Ann Arbor Film Festival 2009

Rising fundamentalism and a government that cites faith to defend its wars have helped foster a desperate society. Between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, there is a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a system of beliefs.

Twelve distinctive female voices come together to form a mosaic of heartbreak and vulnerability set against the backdrop of a modern city both comforting and confrontational. This film explores the isolation of pain and loss and the shared journey toward reconciliation

Through the use of stop-motion animation and projection, the relationship between a projected image and its painted representation and between the location of the projected image and its original source shifts constantly throughout the film like the infinite variations of waves in the sea.

Digitized high resolution images form a rapid flow of visual associations. A filmic Larg Hadron Collider that let's images explode in the viewer's head. Micro and macrocosm, sex and religion, old Egypt and the Space Age are juxtaposed in this purely cinematic 35mm piece.

"In 'The Girl Chewing Gum' a commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes - not prescribes - the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the 'spectra of narrative' (suppressed by structural film), to play word against picture and chance against order. Sharp and direct, the film anticipates the more elaborate scenarios to come; witty, many-layered, punning, but also seriously and poetically haunted by drama's ineradicable ghost." -A.L. Rees, A Directory of British Film & Video Artists

"Great Man and Cinema" is the title of a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, has written, edited, produced and given acting advice in films for the last 40 years. An updated propaganda film made in the North Korean social-realist juche cinema succinctly synthesizes the Dear Leader's feeling towards the U.S.

The Sex Pistols star in director Julien Temple's bizarre and hilarious fictional documentary that charts the rise and fall of punk's most notorious band through the eyes of its calculating manager, Malcolm McLaren. Mixing animation and midgets with footage of some of The Pistols' most electrifying live performances, the 1980 film presents the band's success as an elaborate scam perpetrated by McLaren to make "a million pounds" at the expense of record companies, outraged moralists, the British Royal Family - and even the fans and band members themselves. The Great Rock Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was called "a parable of our times" by the Guardian (UK), but most music fans simply consider it one of the best rock films ever. More than 25 years after their breakup, The Sex Pistols' music continues to influence punk and post-punk bands the world over. The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle shows why.

"'Horizontal Boundaries' is a film that looks at certain aspects of the geography of California as the ground for cinematic disruption and restatement. The "Boundaries" in question turn out to be frame lines, the divisions between two images, one above the other on a strip of 35mm film. The projector gate is adjustable up or down in order to produce a single uninterrupted image: in this film the frame line is integrated into the compositional language of the piece. It is not a static repositioning, but rather a dynamic one, moving more or less randomly, causing image combinations to be generated unpredictably. The result is a tapestry of exquisite contradiction." - Pat O'Neill