Screening:
Friday, April 28, 9:30 PM, Charles 3

Like Dante's descent into hell in Inferno, director Veit Bastian's Enter leads you on a tour of Los Angeles, level by level-providing the viewer with a look into the seedy underbelly of Tinseltown in twelve amazing installments. The documentary begins with the cockroaches trying to escape the friendly exterminator and continues with six-year-olds auditioning for a commercial. Other installments take you indie the worlds of an emergency room doctor, an art collector, a news cameraman, a cock fight, and a porn casting agency and so on. Enter presents an unflinching probe into the disparate, complex worlds that make up Los Angeles. Contains graphic footage.

Tidbit:
Jim South, the porn casting agent featured in Enter, invented a series of abbreviations to classify the most popular scenes required of actresses in "the business." See if you can figure out what they mean: BG, GG, DP, TP, and GB.

With:
Happy? (dir. Mark Street, U.S., 2000, 20 min., Beta SP) Inspired by Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Roach, 1961) and The Pretty Month of May (Chris Marker, 1963) Happy? is an attempt to capture the spirit of a time and a through a series of random interviews-in this case, New York City in the eight months preceding January 1, 2000.

Window Work (dir. Lynne Sachs, U.S., 8 min., Beta SP) A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper-simple tasks that somehow suggest a quiet mystery within and beyond the image. Disperate sounds (crickets, children trembling at the sound of thunder, jangling toys) dislocate the space temporally and physically from the restrictions of reality. Minature images-warm home movies-fill frames within the cold, static, unflinching video frame. Live percussion accompaniment by Tom Goldstein.

Bios:
Internationally renowned independent film and video makers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs (who happen to be married) are both and members of the Maryland Film Festival Advisory Board. Mark currently teaches filmmaking at UMBC. Lynne is on sabbatical working on a feature documentary about the Catonsville Nine. In additon to Happy? and Window Work, The Maryland Film Festival is screening Mark's film Sliding Off the Edge of the World with the feature film A Sign from God, and Lynne's film Drawn and Quartered in the "Other Worlds" shorts program. Lynne Sachs also was the guest curator for the Finley/Serra program.