Now in it’s 22nd year, the touring Black
Maria Film & Video Festival makes a return visit to the Maryland
Film Festival to present a program of award-winning short films.
Named after Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Film Studio –
the world’s first purpose built motion picture studio –
the festival’s mission is to support the vision of independent
film and video makers, and to present a cross-section of fresh,
explorational work which is inventive, diverse, insightful, assertive
and adventuresome.
Post Mark Lick
Director: Sonia Bridge
Country: Kensington Gore, England, UK
Running Time: 4 minutes
Format: 35mm
Synopsis: This exuberant film playfully amplifies the materiality
and fleeting narratives of postcards. The filmmaker collected
stamps and postcards and exposed them directly onto the film itself,
with no digital manipulation.
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The Freak
Director: Aristomenis Tsirbab and Dane Smith
Country: LA, CA
Running Time: 6 minutes
Format: 35mm
Synopsis: This technically masterful digital animation is set
in a post modern, retro futuristic city populated by somnambulistic
clones. A gleefully dancing misfit, or “Freak”, disrupts
the status quo and confounds the authorities. But the Freak’s
free spirited, unorthodox antics ultimately free the citizenry
from the bondage of conformity.
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Guiding Fictions
Director: Mark Street
Country: Brooklyn, NY
Running Time: 5 minutes
Format: 35mm
Synopsis: An exquisitely colored work in which the film was
buried in the forest, letting the earth infuse the emulsion. Later,
the exhumed film was combined with sound recorded in Brooklyn,
where teenage skateboarders and a Russian festival become a counterpoint
to the impressionistic images of rich fall foliage. Warm intonations
and the schism between country and city deeply etch this painterly
work.
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Seasons…
Director: Stan Brakhage with Phil Solomon
Country: Broomfield, CO
Running Time: 15 minutes
Format: 16mm silent
Synopsis: The late, great Stan Brakhage is known internationally
for his prolific creative career. This is his latest hand made,
frame-by-frame work of art employing direct etching into the film
emulsion itself. Optically printed and illuminated by colleague
Phil Solomon, the work emerges as a four part “season cycle”
which is a component of a larger work. It is inspired by the colors
and textures found in the woodcuts of Holusai and Hiroshige and
the playfully dancing forms in the films of Robert Breer and Len
Lye.
A Conversation With Harris
Director: Sheila Sofian
Country: Pasadena, CA
Running Time: 6 minutes
Format: 16mm
Synopsis: Employing an unusual amalgam of animation and documentary
interview, this film is a conversation with an eleven-year old
Bosnian boy who recounts his war experiences in his native country.
The film’s fleeting hand-painted images dissolve and melt,
evaporating and reappearing like spirits haunting our dreams.
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Switch Center
Director: Ericka Beckman
Country: Hillsdale, NY
Running Time: 10 minutes
Format: 16mm
Synopsis: Shot at the Danube Waterworks Purificant Plant on
the outskirts of Budapest, the labyrinthine look of this absurdist
film is reminiscent of the paintings of M.C. Escher. Workers turn
valves, shift levers, and climb industrial stairwells in an endless
cycle of irrational openings and closings.
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Golden Gums
Director: Matt Wolf
Country: Brooklyn, NY
Running Time: 13 minutes
Format: video
Synopsis: This film probes the inner-workings of an indulged
post-adolescent psyche. An edgy, campy, deconstructed self-portrait
which ultimately discloses personal history and dismantles conventional
autobiographical forms through public confession and private performance.
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Life Liberty and the Pursuit Of Happiness
Director: Tiffany Shalin
Country: SF, CA
Running Time: 14 minutes
Format: video
Synopsis: This smart, biting film offers a commentary satirizing
the current debate about reproductive rights. Vintage educational
film footage, animation and original images are interwoven into
a collage of fictional stories involving a conservative politician,
a young couple, a fundamentalist and the decline of amphibian
populations.
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Dreamscapes
Director: Sean McBride
Country: Blue Bell, PA
Running Time: 5 minutes
Format: video
Synopsis: For this brilliant digital animation, dreams were
collected, culled, and blended into a melange dreamscape. A crazy-quilt
patchwork of visual styles and sound vividly reflect the diversity
of the dreamers themselves.
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The Geosophist’s Tears
Director: Peter Rose
Country: Philadelphia, PA
Running Time: 8 minutes
Format: video
Synopsis: Shot during a seven-week cross country road trip shortly
after September 11th, this experimental work by noted video artist
Peter Rose offers a meditation on the iconography of the American
landscape. Drawing on the stratagems of the early geosophists,
who believed that through the operation of a mysterious instrument
landscapes might emotionally interact with one another, this film
uses algorithms to emphasize structural features in the landscape.
The mournful and rhapsodic audio is built from an 1895 slide rule.
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The Griffith Circle
Director: Ip Yuk Yiu
Country: Hong Kong, China
Running Time: 4 minutes
Format: video
Synopsis: This is a conceptual art piece in which a two sided
spinning screen within the video reveals scenes from some of the
earliest films by master silent era filmmaker D.W. Griffith. The
kinetic interaction between the spinning screen and the motion
within the scenes is mesmerizing.
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Set Set Spike
Director: Emily Hubley
Country: Maplewood, NJ
Running Time: 6 minutes
Format: video
Synopsis: This intriguing piece uses animated and live-action
footage to create a kind of temporal collage, where past and present
emotional truths coexist and frolic. Featuring music by Yo La
Tengo.
Presented by: Alvin Larkins
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