Independent filmmakers will present new features and shorts at TechnoVisions, the 12th Annual Virginia Film Festival. As an accompaniment to this year's theme TechnoVisions, the Festival program will feature artistically adventurous films that explore new movie and media technologies — some with enthusiasm, some with skepticism. Filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Gordon Eriksen, Andrew Shea, and Caspar Stracke will attend to discuss their films with Festival audiences.
Director Gorden Eriksen will present his film The Love Machine, a portrait of five individuals seeking companionship over the Internet and a critical examination of the tactics used by a documentary filmmaker to create a "buzz-worthy" story from the ordinary fabric of their lives. Eriksen, who appeared with his film Scenes from the New World at the 1995 Virginia Film Festival, has committed himself to populist, no-budget film making with an unusual mix of actors from diverse cultural backgrounds throughout his career.
(Saturday, October 23, 10:00 PM, Regal Downtown Mall Cinema.)
The Festival will present Spectres of the Spectrum and the film's director, Craig Baldwin, the brilliant college-essayist. Spectres of the Spectrum is an experimental black comedy and science fiction allegory about "electromagnetic autonomy" in the face of massive media conglomeration. Set in the year 2007, the film follows the story of a young telepathic woman and her father, a technological outlaw, holed up in the desert. They lead a resistance against a corporate/governmental "New Electromagnetic Order" which threatens to use the earth's "magnetoshphere" to "bulk erase" the brains of every human on the planet. A wildly energetic blend of science fiction and science fact, Spectres of the Spectrum rifles through the trash bins of our image-obsessed culture to piece together a collage on our love affair with technology.
(Saturday, Octber 23 at 10:00 PM, Vinegar Hill Theatre.)
Director Andrew Shea will be on hand to present his refreshingly original dark comedy, The Corndog Man, which explores the degenerative effects of racism in a southern rural town. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, features Ace Barker (Noble Willingham) as a redneck boat salesman in South Carolina, pursued by a mysterious stranger who chooses phone harassment as his weapon. In The Corndog Man, the telephone demonstrates its potential as fear-inducing device which becomes the threat as the stalker's disembodied voice invades Ace Barker's privacy and begins to reveal his racist psychology.
(Friday, October 22, at 10:00 PM, Regal Downtown Mall Cinema)
Director Caspar Stracke will introduce his experimental feature length work, Circle's Short Circuit, a film that has neither a beginning nor an end, and is virtually able to start at any random point. Circle's Short Circuit moves through a circle consisting of five interlocking episodes that describe the phenomenon of interruption in contemporary communications. Along the path of this circle the genre changes with each episode as it moves from documentary, to essay, to collage, to simulated live-coverage, and to silent film. The film also pays homage to the de-constructionist Jacques Derrida, the French writer, Boris Vian and the ghost of the Japanese experimental theatre and cinema, Shuji Terayama.
(Friday, October 22, 10:00 PM, Vinegar Hill Theatre.)
The Festival will also show Man of the Century, an upcoming Fine Line Features screwball comedy that lovingly embraces the black and white look and 1.33.1 square-shaped aspect ratio of classic Hollywood movies. The classic look is appropriate for Man of the Century's hero, Honny Twennies, a Depression-era newspaper man, out of time and oblivious to the modern world of sex and cynicism. This program is being co-presented with the Independent Film Channel.
(Saturday, October 23, 7:00 PM, Regal Downtown Mall.)
The Festival and the University of Virginia's Women's Center will present two programs of short films selected from its annual solicitation to independent filmmakers. Special Effects (Women in Peril!) features images of women imperiled by or reclaiming the technololgies of special effects. Janet Wondra's Apotehosis is a silent comedy about unrequited love and spontaneous human combustion. M. Frank's Purgatory tracks a woman in a world moving backwards. Outer Space, a film by Peter Tscherkassky, dismantles the celluloid image of Barbara Hershey, while Morgan Freman's The Cherry Picker stars Janeane Garofalo as the feisty film technician.
Miniature TechnoVisions includes films that inventively employ special effects. These films include: Jeff Walker's My Big Heart, Chris Clements' Digital Gremlin for Windows.
(Special Effects, Friday, October 22, 4:00 PM, Regal.
Miniature TechnoVisions, Thursday, October 21, Regal).
The Festival will present Better Living Through Circuitry, a film that explores the electronic dance community and the techno-subculture it has spawnaed. Director John Reiss conducts in-depth interviews with New York deconstructionist-philosopher and electronic mixmaster, DJSpooky; hedonistic street-smart "superstar" DJ Keoki; the Vegas-reared Big Beat sonic wizards; The Crystal Method; Bristol, England's prophet of drum and bass, Roni Size; and the DJ/musician/producer definer of crossover appeal Moby — to name a few. In keeping with the film's theme of "empowerment through technology," the production is decidedly digital, utilizing the latest digital film making equipment, a tiny Sony VX1000 digital video camera which the director carried in a backpack..
(Friday, October 22, 7pm, Vinegar Hill)
In Home Page, director Doug Black searches out the practitioners of the online diary to explore what makes people so willing to expose their private lives over the Internet. Home Page is a witty, entertaining and unexpectedly personal look at life and love in the cyber-era. Block and his camera enter the world of charismatic 21-year-old Justin Hall, whose emotionally wrenching, literally bare-all Web site. Justin's links from the Underground (www.links.net) has attracted comparisons to Kerouac and enjoys a shockingly large following.
(Saturday, October 23, 7pm, Vinegar Hill)
In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, director Johan Grimonprez unofficially chronicles worldwide aiplane hijackings in this pseudo-documentary. This film is a playfully subversive tour of hijacking history — from the the romantic hijacker-revolutionary of the sixties to the cynical, anonymous parcel bomber of the ninties. Grimonprez blends archival footage and personal home movie imagery to instigate the media politics of contemporary catastrophe culture.
(Sunday, October 24, 4pm, Regal)
Check the web site at www.vafilm.com or phone the office a 1-800-UVA-FEST, or 804-982-5277 for complete schedule information, locations and ticket information.
