Now in it’s 23rd 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.
Presented by: Alvin Larkins

(notes by Marcin Ramocki, Isaac E. Mathes, John Columbus, and Alvin Larkins)

Cubica – M. Ash, 4:00 (Vienna, Austria)
Minimal and elegant, Cubica shows a self-organizing system of initially simple geometric forms. Based in the universe of early computer graphics, the animation hints at relations between digital and biological structures. –M.R.

Five AM – Michael Van Bakel, 1:00 (The Netherlands)
This visually stunning optical experiment depicts a horseback rider trotting through an empty city plaza. The vent, shot simultaneously with multiple cameras, envelops the viewer in a gradually slowing rhythmical flux. –M.R.

Fast Film – Virgil Widrich 14:00 (Vienna, Austria)
In the space of a Bogart/Bacall kiss and via a breathless manipulation of collage and frame-within-the-frame compositing, cinema history is transcended with stunning continuity. Jump on this runaway train bound for tinsel-land, where movies never have to end, but inter cut with and refer to each other endlessly. –I.M.

Nibbles – Chris Hinton, 5:00 (Hollywood, CA)
(OSCAR NOMINEE) This riotous work of animation art depicts a gluttonous holiday careening across the American landscape guzzling fast food of every description en route. Burgers, fries, donuts, pizza, tacos, and even a drive-thru sushi bar won’t tame the family’s wildly insatiable appetite. –J.C.

The Stairway To St. Paul’s – Jeroen Offerman, 8:00 (Berlin, Germany)
Jeroen Offerman takes on Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, and he does it backward. It is both a clever postmodern manipulation and a hilarious temporal exercise. –M.R.

Tender Bodies – James Duesing, 8:00 (Pittsburgh, PA)
This is a computer animation in which the artist uses the logic of computer games to implode and reconstruct narrative space in a wildly imaginative world. Strange genetically altered characters hunt and are hunted in an ever shifting “twilight zone.” -J.C.

Bacon – Hugo Marmugi, 1:00 (Downingtown, PA)
A witty vignette that offers a whimsically offbeat perspective on a staple of the American breakfast table. –J.C.

Dental Farmer – Ellen Brodsky and Dunya Alwan, 15:00 (Cambridge, MA)
This is the story of a hero of rural America. This lovely character study tells the story of a rare individual, a vegetarian doctor who runs a free dental clinic on his farm in Appalachia and grows Jerusalem artichokes in his garden. –J.C.

ID – Mara Mattuschka, 10:00 (Austria)
An ordinary ride on an escalator becomes a bizarre and horrifying trip to the netherworld for the director’s alter ego, actress Mimi Minus. Against the background of an indistinct landscape, Mimi mutates into a wretched creature and takes part in a supernatural ritual with what appears to be a duplicate of herself. –A.L.

Luminous – Brian Rise, 11:00 (Austin, TX)
An ironic, visual meditation with Jack Kerouac readings, a Hawaiian ballad, and the 50s rock hit “Count Every Star” sung by the Ravens. It’s pure Americana, an appealingly contrived pictorial essay set in a grungy amusement park. –J.C.

The Spirit Of Gravity – Victor Bellomo & David Pace, 6:00 (Palo Alto, CA)
This outlandishly whimsical collage animation featuring handmade and 3D digital graphic portrays a wacky Nietzsche clad in long johns as he floats across the sky singing his philosophy to a fantasy landscape of bubbles while stars hover over an impossible village in the middle of the Astral Plane. –J.C.

Watch – Robert Todd, 6:00 (Boston, MA)
Watches and clocks everywhere, in marvelous close-up detail, syncopated, escapement movements, springs, chimes, ticking for 55 years. In their quirky and rare shop piled high with treasures, Konrad and Ursula Brzezinski carry on. –J.C.

Zeno’s Paradox – Robert Arnold, 5:00 (Jamaica Plain, MA)
A stunning film within a film within a film; a mobius strip based on a pastoral scene, a park, a tree with a photograph of a park, a tree and a photograph. This has been done before but not with the infinite digital variation seen here. -J.C.

Don’t miss these other films from the Black Maria Film & Video Festival and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, showing elsewhere in the Maryland Film Festival:
Eric Dyer’s Chopin’s Bicycle
Alan Price’s Overpass
Roger Beebe’s Famous Irish Americans
David Licata’s Tango Octogenario

Bio: Alvin Larkins is the Associate Director for the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Prior to working at the Festival, Alvin worked as stage manager for the Negro Ensemble Theater in Houston, Texas and as casting director for the independent feature film Raw As You Wanna Be. Alvin received his undergraduate degree in English from Yale University and a Master of Fine Arts in filmmaking from Syracuse University. His films include Distance, Inside Out, and Eyelight.
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