Screening:
Saturday, April 29, 2:30 PM, Charles 3

This program features two of the most compelling and active media artists working in America today. Passionate and artistically adventurous, Jeanne Finley and M.M. Serra will hurl their personal visions of transgression, femininity and power onto the screen. With over two decades in the world of alternative film and video, both Serra and Finley depict richly drawn characters from American culture you are not soon to forget.

Finley will screen three works that explore the uneasy tensions between institutional authority and individual resistance:

The Adventures of Blacky (a collaboration with John H. Muse, 1998, 9 min., Beta SP), is based on a series of drawings of a family of dogs designed in the '50s as a psychoanalytical test for children.
Nomads at the 25 Door (1991, 42 min., Beta SP), revolves around a series of interviews with a 22 year-old woman serving a life sentence for the murder of her mother. The tape explores the shifting relationship of power between a girl and her family and the government and its people.
Loss Prevention (a work-in-progress) tells the story of an elderly woman who was arrested by shoplifting. "I am fascinated by the conflict between the document and the documented, fiction and representation, the frailty of relationships, and the absurd authenticity of being alive," says Finley when asked to encapsulate the very essence of her work.

M.M. Serra is an artist whose work focuses on women and erotica, exploring the body as a source of pleasure, pain and passion. She will screen:

Darling International (a collaboration with Jennifer Reeves, 1999, 22 min., 16mm), a dark and sensual narrative that explores a skilled technical worker's sexual fantasies during her nights as a femme on the lower east side of New York. This new film recently won awards at Sundance and was shown at the Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals.
Just for You Girls (1998, 2 min., 16mm), a parody of the Johnson Baby Powder ad.
Soi-Meme, (1997, 10 min., 16mm), a hand-processed film starring the goddess Rosemary doing her sexy "Wet Spot" performance.

Bios:
Jeanne Finley is a professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Her video works have been screened at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art and abroad at the London Film Festival and the Yugoslavian Biennial, amongst others. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Scholars program and the National Endowment for the Arts. Jeanne Finley will participate on the panel, "Filmmaking Outside the Mainstream."

M.M. Serra is a professor of Media Arts at the New School University in New York. She is also the Executive Director of the Filmmakers' Cooperative, the oldest, most comprehensive distributor of independent, experimental film and video in the world. Her films have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, the San Francsicso Cinematheque and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, just a few amongst hundreds of other alternative venues and festivals. M.M. Serra will participate on the panel, "Filmmaking Outside the Mainstream."

These notes were written by program curator Lynne Sachs, a Baltimore film and video maker who serves on the Maryland Film Festival Advisory Board. Two of Lynne's works, Drawn and Quartered ("Other Worlds" shorts program) and Window Work (w/Enter) are featured in the Maryland Film Festival 2000.