Euphoria

Screening Time:
Friday, May 6, 10:30 AM
Charles Theatre 2

Friday, May 6, 8:00 PM
Howard Community College

Saturday, May 7, 7:00 PM
Charles Theatre 2 

Director: Lee Boot

Cast: Gloria Mayfield Banks, Kelly Bell, Keith Boissiere, Earl Brinton, Mary Brinton, Gregorieo Consad, Jessica Jones, Bev Harrington, Kim T. Ha, Christopher Rondholz, Michael Salcman, MD, Kareem Shaya

Country: U.S.
Year: 2005
Running Time: 85 minutes
Format: video

Question: What is the real American Dream?  Answer: Happiness!  Euphoria is a visually intriguing documentary/educational film/experimental hybrid that explores happiness in all of its many forms and origins.  Director/narrator Lee Boot walks the audience through many varied settings - backyards, city streets, industrial wastelands.  He introduces us to real people, and puts together the euphoria puzzle using pieces of anthropology, Western history, and neuroscience, while explaining his points with visual symbols and metaphors made with unexpected objects ("work verses play" is demonstrated with children trying to close briefcases containing inflated beachballs).  The message is simple:  "No soft drink is the real thing - happiness is what happens when we pursue meaning and engagement."  The National Institutes of Health funded Euphoria with a research grant to see if exploring what really creates long-term euphoria can help people avoid addiction better than trying to scare them with TV ads.

-- Skizz Cyzyk

Presented By: Lee Boot

Biography:  Artist/educator, Lee Boot's video and internet works have been broadcast and exhibited nationally and internationally in a number of venues including Public Television, the Johannesburg Biennial in South Africa, London's Serpentine Gallery, and Baltimore's Contemporary Museum.  Boot left his fifteen-year high school teaching career in 2000 (a career that earned him a Distinguished Teacher Award from the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars), to work on Euphoria (a similar 30-minute piece, Making Euphoria, screened at the 2001 Maryland Film Festival).  He envisions this project as a way to publicly express and illuminate information that is profound, but doesn't easily fit into school curricula.  Boot's Baltimore-based company, InfoCulture, utilizes his video art sensibilities to restructure both the form and content of traditional information-based film and video in order to create an aesthetic that allows ideas to resonate culturally.