Celebrating it's 25th Anniversary, the Thomas Edison Black Maria Film & Video Festival's national tour returns to the Maryland Film Festival with another collection of award wining shorts from some well-known, and some not-so-well-known cutting edge filmmakers. Presented by Alvin Larkins.

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 and has made three films, Distance, Inside Out, and Eyelight.

I Am (Not) van Gogh
Director: David Russo
5:00 minutes, 35mm, Seattle, WA
A tour de force of cinematic acrobatics, I Am (Not) van Gogh teases and delights the eye. The filmmaker exercises his prowess with the medium through stunning pixilated photography that employs playfully inventive effects picturing a man with a placard declaring that he is not van Gogh.

Instructions for Light and Sound Machine
Director: Peter Tscherkassky
17:00 minutes, 35mm, Vienna, Austria
This monumental work, made in cinemascope, deconstructs and reframes vintage cowboy films in an attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek Tragedy. Highly manipulated fragments from Hollywood Westerns and /or "Spaghetti" Westerns twist the genre into a reflexive meditation on the life and death of the cinema.

The Legend of Black Tom
Director: Deron Albright
16:00 minutes, video, Narbeth, PA
Based on a true story, this animation explores the golden age of bare knuckle fighting. Former slave Bill Richmond must risk his comfortable integration in the white world of 19th-century London by joining forces with boxing prodigy Tom Molineaux, himself a freed American slave, to capture the bare-knuckle boxing championship of the world.

Octave
Director: Emily Hubley
7:00 minutes, video, Maplewood, NJ
A skull at the beach, a busted watch, a green brassiere… Animated film miniatures play with musical tones and shifting symbolic images to create eight moments when things come together in mysterious cohesion. Accompanied by inventive and riveting sound by Yo La Tengo, the imagery, with its eclectic, surprising visual vocabulary, becomes simply hypnotic and fun.

Reporter Zero
Director: Carrie Lozano
25:00 minutes, video, Berkeley, CA
Reporter Zero is a short documentary that chronicles the intersection of journalist Randy Shilts and the mysterious beginnings of the AIDS epidemic. Beginning with zero fatalities and ending with 20 million, it's a cautionary tale about the politics that prevented civil rights, public health, and one reporter from finding common ground.

A Time To Die
Director: Joe Gibbons
8:00 minutes, video, Malden, MA
Among the first person video diarists, iconoclast Joe Gibbons has no equal. In this new work, he examines his microcosm of the pecking order within the natural world of flowers mapping on his own psychological manifestations of value, weakness, and fears.

Tribe
Director: Tiffany Shlain
18:00 minutes, video, San Francisco, CA
Tribe takes the audience on an eclectic ride through the complex history of both the Barbie doll and the Jewish people. Using archival footage, graphics, animation, Barbie dioramas, and slam poetry, The Tribe sheds light on what it means to be an American Jew in the 21st Century.

Don't miss these other films from the Black Maria Film & Video Festival, showing elsewhere in the Maryland Film Festival:

Fred Worden's Here
Richie Sherman's Demolition 7
Thorsten Fleisch's Kosmos
Sonali Gulati's Nalini By Day, Nancy By Night
Bert Shapiro's The Organistas