February 2006, Minikino Monthly screening and discussion

Antimatter Underground Film Festival
(DENPASAR SCREENING PROGRAM)
at Minikino’s monthly screening and discussion, February 2006
(Schedule for JAKARTA SCREENING PROGRAM)

Dedicated to the exhibition and nurturing of film and video as art, Antimatter has grown into the premier showcase of experimental film in the west. Encompassing screenings, installations, performances and hybrid media experiments, Antimatter provides a noncompetitive festival setting in Victoria, British Columbia, free from commercial and industry agendas.

The highest standards of curatorial practice are employed to build thematic programs of innovative film and video selected from international submissions. In addition, our annual Foreign Matter series has become the incubator for hundreds of short films, all new to North American audiences, compiled and contextualized by international curators. Reciprocally, Antimatter delivers curated programs of new Canadian work to international audiences through our Foreign Matter tours. Since 1998, the quality and creativity of its programming, commitment to audience development, and respect for filmmakers and their work have made Antimatter one of the most important media arts events in Canada, and the world.

The Foreign Matter touring programs are organized and curated by Deborah de Boer (Curator, Antimatter) and Todd Eacrett (Festival Director, Antimatter)

Rogue Art / Antimatter Underground Film Festival
1322 Broad Street, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 2A9
Tel/Fax: 250-385-3327
Web Site: www.antimatter.ws

LIGHTSTRUCK
(scheduled for February 2006: minikino in Denpasar)
Lightstruck comprises 12 experimental pieces that concern themselves with the material and historical processes of filmmaking. Through a variety of formal techniques-hand-processing/manipulation/toning, direct animation, optical printing and recontextualizing found footage-they reference and reinvent the inherent photochemical and mechanical nature of the medium. The conscious use of film’s physical properties also furthers a shared investigation of, and commentary on, the styles and conceits of classic cinema. The inversion of existing narratives and construction of new ones from found and archival source materials collude with the often autobiographical qualities of personal filmmaking to rewrite cinematic history.

	Shooting Star (Jason Britski/16mm/2002/Can/4:35) Shooting Star is a film about mortality. The film is a moving x-ray of small and grand gestures alike, grounded in the detail of our surroundings, and the beauty that resonates from these hidden places.
	Without Leave (Gary Evans & Karl Fodor/S8 on video/2002/Can/3:28) Evans and Fodor use toned and manipulated film stock and disjunctive visual narrative to powerfully convey the sense of movement, urgency and exhilaration in this story of servicemen going AWOL.
	Final: (Toxic 6) (Gerald Saul/16mm/2002/Can/5:00) Time races ahead of us and we will never win. Cinema decays while progress disrupts internal orders. We do not inherit the earth.
	Great Leap Forward (Jeff Carter 16mm/2001/Can/3:25) Mao’s China: a train station, dignitaries, speeches, thousands of onlookers. Great Leap Forward is derived from found footage happened upon in a Gastown warehouse. The source of the footage is unknown, as is any information about the decades-old media event depicted. Step-printed using an optical printer, the film situates the activities in the displaced half-remembered realm of dreams.
	Absolutely (Aleesa Cohene/video/2003/Can/8:30) Absolutely is a pseudo-documentary about history, politics and the body. Weaving through various sources and re-contextualized found footage, Absolutely interviews four characters about democracy, revolution and their internal manifestations.
	Cooper/Bridges Fight (Christina Battle/16mm/2002/Can/3:00) Cooper/Bridges Fight reconstructs an infamous scene from the highly politicized western "High Noon." "They punish each other mercilessly, nothing barred. The horses, becoming nervous, rear and whine in their stalls."
	Erotography for the Fastidious Connoisseur (Etienne Desrosiers/video/2002/Can/4:20) A search for the erotic ghost in the porn universe. Six scraps of 8mm found footage from the sixties are stripped naked in search of intimacy. Floating figures escape their sexual content in a saturated media canvas, and electronic music is combined with erotic hot flashes and spontaneous climaxes in this thriller-cum-blue movie.
	Saraban (Emmanuel Lefrant/16mm/2002/Can/6:00) A one-man flamenco in the form of a cameraless animation.
	Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road + 97th Street (Christina Battle/16mm/2002/Can/3:00) Focusing on the mesmeric and repetitive processes of oil wells in northern Alberta, this film documents a sighting common to the Canadian prairies that is both epic and mundane.
	Chiasmus (Daichi Saito/16mm/2003/Can/8:00) An exploration into the process of perception, the act of seeing and listening, Chiasmus takes film as a metaphor for the breathing body, the medium intercrossing the fragmented and abstract images of the body in movement. The rhythm and tension created by the interplay between sound and image, their disjunction and conjunction, aspire to an organic and sensual moment where inside becomes outside, and outside inside.
	Self-Portrait Post Mortem (Louise Bourque/16mm/2002/Can/2:30) An unearthed time-capsule-consisting of long buried footage of the filmmaker’s youthful self-reveals an exquisite corpse with nature as collaborator. A metaphysical pas de deux in which decay undermines the integrity of the image but in the process initiates a transmutation..
	18,000 Dead in Gordon Head (Clive Holden/video/2001/Can/13:00) Based on the filmmaker’s eyewitness accounts of a shocking and random act of violence which took place in Victoria in 1985, 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head is a treatise on the omnipresence of violence in contemporary culture. Composed as a poem, it’s a hybrid of several film stocks and video formats, digitally processed to create a violent, yet lyrical, collage of textured loops, internal rhythms and visual rhymes, finally completing the work’s cycle back to film.