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Roam – California, 13:40 minutes, 2001
Director: Carolina Vila-Ramirez
Homeless street kids play out an all-too-modern but classically poignant version of "He ain't heavy, he's my brother."

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What's Wrong with This Picture - Texas, 0:28 minutes, 2003
Director: Jeffrey Travis
This film started as an idea for a longer short film about children's crayon drawings that come to life, with the drawings wreaking havoc in the world around them and then disappearing back onto the paper whenever an adult came around.  But with no budget and a one-week deadline, Jeffrey Travis decided to produce something smaller in scope and experiment with live action and animation.  The short was shot in one hour without any crew.  David Young later developed the animation over a period of a week.   Aidan Travis, the young boy in the short (who happens to be Jeffrey Travis' son), received two big cookies to eat after the wrap.
About Jeffrey Travis: An award-winning filmmaker who has written and directed The Tiggersheet Diaries, Busy Signals, the Spanish-language Recuerdos de un Mate and others, Jeffrey Travis was born in Mexico City and later moved to Argentina, where he lived with his missionary parents until he graduated from high school.  He began his college career at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993.  He earned a Master's degree in Engineering in 1995.  He launched a software company in 1998 and published two textbooks before founding a film co-op in Austin called Project Seven (www.projectseven.info).  Travis and creative/business partner David Taylor formed a production company, Dos Gringos Productions (www.dosgringos.us) which produces both short films and feature films.

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PROGRAM #2
Drawing the War – Lebanon, 5:02 minutes
Director: Lena I. Merhej
A Rorschach of abstract images coalesces into a portrait of a war-torn family in this chilling animated piece..

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Confession – Pennsylvania, 19:00 minutes, 2001
Director: Marina Petrovskaia
"I want to make a confession. I used my camera as a weapon to manipulate a now defenseless person and she has been haunting me ever since," declares filmmaker Marina Petrovskaia in her pioneering documentary, "Confession." Petrovskaia journeys to Germany with the explicit purpose of confronting her ailing aunt and coaxing her into disclosing an unsavory episode in their family’s history. Shot in black and white, with generous use of archival images and artfully placed text, Petrovskaia challenges conventional documentary techniques by purposely manipulating interviews and incorporating experimental devices to disjoint the disturbing narrative reluctantly offered by her aunt. While chronicling her confessional, the filmmaker calls into question her own moral authority over her investigation and, ultimately, presents a probing critique on the ethics of non-fiction filmmaking.
About Marina Petrovskaia: Marina Petrovskaia is a Russian independent filmmaker who lives in the United States. In April 2001 she founded Cinewindow Productions, a documentary production unit, and produces her
own work independently from Russian and American studios. She is an advanced MFA candidate in Filmmaking at Temple University Film School. Marina has produced several experimental films, which she intends to put together as a collection of shorts, among them: "An Attempt at a Fairy Tale", "Rossini and Bolex" and "Fake Nostalgia." Currently she is in pre-production on her thesis film, a feature length DV documentary "The Round Trip" about Russian adoption to USA.

Darwin's Evolutionary Stakes - Australia, 3:30 minutes, 1998
Director: Andrew Horne
This clever animated piece follows the human "race" from the opening gun to a photo-finish in the new millennium.

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PROGRAM #3
Sofa Rockers – Austria, 5:16 minutes, 2000
Director: Timo Novotny
Each beat has its own speed; each tempo suggests certain images.  Timo Novotny's video for Richard Dorfmeister's Sofa Surfers remix was shot in Japan.   As the bass begins softly, images move up along a vertical line, apparently reflecting the path of an elevator.  A small model of the Statue of Liberty appears and the vertical movement becomes horizontal, moving from Tokyo to Kyoto.  Near the end, the rhythm materializes in the human body as dancers appear.

Arrêté - Austria, 11:16 minutes, 2001
Director: Bernhard Schreiner
Almost beyond perception, a visual poem emerges, pierced by flashing images and sounds from outside as unsettling as the engulfing darkness within.

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My Body is a Boat – New York, 7:15 minutes, 2000
Director: Shalom Gorewitz
The incomparable Shalom Gorewitz combines words and music, sound and image, analog and digital technique, to celebrate the ceaseless flow of life and nature.
About Shalom Gorewitz: Shalom Gorewitz was born in 1949. He received a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins and Allan Kaprow; and an M.F.A. from Antioch International University. The 1989 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Gorewitz has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. He was an artist in residence at the Experimental Television Center, Oswego, New York, from 1978-93, and was artist-in-residence at the Beersheva Institute of Art in Jerusalem. A professor of Multimedia Arts at Ramapo College, New Jersey for more than twenty years, he was dean of the School of Contemporary Arts from 1991-98 and is now convenor (chair) of the visual arts program while continuing to teach studio courses and seminars relating to electronic media. He has also taught at the University of Bridgeport and Hofstra University. Gorewitz's work has been exhibited internationally, at festivals and institutions including the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Kowasaki Museum, Tokyo. His work has been featured on National Public Television, the Learning Channel, the USA Cable Network, and many regional PBS stations. He lives in New York City. In addition to ongoing work with video, he is producing digital prints and work created specifically for the World Wide Web.

Besenbahn - Austria, 10:48 minutes, 2001
Director: Dietmar Offenhuber
An eerie sound track and a relentlessly moving camera combine to convey both a reassuring sameness and the inevitability of decay.

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PROGRAM #4
The Meadow - Texas, 10:48 minutes
Director: Mitko Panov
Somewhere in Central Europe, two neighbors collaborate in an ancient ritual of sowing and reaping, living and dying.

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Epiphany - Texas, 8:48 minutes
Director: Joseph Ambrosavage
With subtle, offbeat humor, the filmmaker takes a swipe at our all-too-human foibles, with a payoff right out of The Twilight Zone.

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PROGRAM #5
Yours is Next (A La Otra) - Mexico, 7:13 minutes, 2002, in Spanish with English subtitles
Director: Sandra Solares
A modern-day highwayman takes a shine to a would-be target -- who is not quite what she seems.

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The Message Storm - United Kingdom, 10:00 minutes, 2002
Director: Toby Meakins
When her dead lover sends her an undeveloped photograph, a grieving woman must decide whether she truly wants to see beyond life. . .

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Clutch - Australia, 8:00 minutes, 2003
Director: Jackie Schulz
Brian's hangover gets even worse when his ex-girlfriend drops off her car to his repair shop.  She also hands over their five year old daughter, Rosie, to stay with Daddy until the clutch is fixed.  He's behind in his work, he can't find the part and a mechanic's workshop is no place for a fairy princess. . . or is it?

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PROGRAM #6
First To See the Sun - United Kingdom, 9:42 minutes, 2003
Director: Joe Tunmer
The battle of the sexes takes a curious tumble in this futuristic British tale of courtship, cross-checks and online gambling.

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Big Canyon - California, 10:33 minutes, 1999
Director: David Agosto
Big Canyon is a comedy about a young couple who cruise around the Midwest selling bogus phone cards.  They spend their free time playing a game called Worst Case Scenario. where one dreams up a series of increasingly difficult situations which the other must try to figure a way out of.  Eventually they get into a real life "worst-case-scenario" and find the game version was a lot easier to play.
About David Agosto: After getting his MFA in film production, David Agosto spent ten years producing music videos and directing training films in Chicago.   Big Canyon is his fourth short film.  He currently resides in Los Angeles where he continues to be a filmmaker.

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PROGRAM #7
What I Remember - New York, 5:00 minutes, 1998
Director: Robert Frank
Pioneering American avant-gardist Robert Frank recalls, re-creates and re-enacts a visit with another photographic genius, Alfred Stieglitz.

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Seven Hours To Burn - Canada, 9:00 minutes, 1999
Director: Shanti Thakur
"A visually expressive personal documentary that explores a family's history. Filmmaker Thakur mixes richly abstract filmmaking with disturbing archival war footage to narrate the story of her Danish mother's and Indian father's experiences. Her mother survives Nazi-occupied Denmark while her father experiences the devastating civil war in India between Hindus and Muslims. Both émigrés to Canada, they meet and marry, linking two parallel wars. Their daughter lyrically turns these two separate histories into a visually rich poem linking past and present in a new singular identity." Doubletake Documentary Film Festival Catalogue
About Shanti Thakur: Born in Canada, Shanti Thakur has been making award-winning films since 1992.
She produced and directed documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) for 8 years. Her recent documentaries are more experimental. She is now expanding to fiction. Seven Hours to Burn is a personal memoir of two different wars based on notions of racial/religious purity experienced by her Danish and Indian parents. Seven Hours to Burn broadcast on the Sundance Channel, won 10 awards and screened in 45 international film festivals. It screened at the Cannes Film Festival, sponsored by Kodak in its "Emerging Filmmaker" showcase. Shanti holds degrees in psychology and media, as well as an MFA in Film from Temple
University. She was a Visiting Full-time Professor in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received a Pew Fellowship for the Arts and Media Arts Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. Currently, Shanti is finishing Kairos, a narrative short film, which she wrote, directed and produced. Kairos is about a woman who must choose between two contradictory lovers and two different kinds of happiness. To be released September 2002. She is also developing a feature film script Breathe.

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Gertrudis Blues - Mexico, 10:00 minutes, 2001, in Spanish with English subtitles
Director: Patricia Carillo-Carrera
Times and places, races and nations, languages and musical forms -- all are freely mixed in this memoir of one woman's remarkable heritage.

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Intersection - Texas, 3:00 minutes, 2003
Director: Arie L. Stavchansky
Intersection represents the choices we make in life and whom we choose to make them with. Looking through a window on a rainy day, we see a constant flow of cars choosing to go in different directions at an intersection while raindrops tell a similar but hopeful story. The story touches on the cyclical nature of how man and woman unite then separate. Intersection also demonstrates a novel technique for animating computer-generated raindrops on any smooth surface. To develop Intersection, a unique formulation to create several layers of organic masks was researched, developed, and applied.
About Arie L. Stavchansky: Arie Stavchansky has a background in film & video production, animation, and interaction design. After earning a Masters of Design in Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University, he is now pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in the department of Radio-Television-Film. His primary research focuses on the discovery of new techniques for visual effects and motion graphics. Also, he enjoys designing interfaces to digital media production tools that help artists, designers, and filmmakers crystallize their visions. Artificially recreating natural phenomena in visual media is one of his interests, and he considers it to be one of the greatest challenges known to visual artists.

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PROGRAM #8
Hard Labor - United Kingdom, 10:00 minutes, 2002
Director: Oliver Krimpas
In a triangular tale of contemporary life, two women become pregnant by the same man -- but who will be left holding the baby?

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In God We Trust - California, 16:35 minutes
Director: Jason Reitman
Fate gives a mischievous prankster a second chance in this satirical life and death comedy.

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PROGRAM #9
Angels (Des Anges) - France, 14:13 minutes, 2001, in French with English subtitles
Director: Julien Leloup
For the troubled and troublesome youths in this disturbing narrative, violence comes all too easily and breeds only pain, confusion and further violence.

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The Kisses of Others (Les Baisers des Autres) - France, 13:37 minutes, 2002, in French with English subtitles
Director: Carine Tardieu
With wit and bittersweet poignancy, a woman looks back on her anxious confusion as a girl contemplating "the kisses of others."

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PROGRAM #10
Black Sheep - Australia, 27:00 minutes, 1999
Director: Louise Glover
Lou Glover grew up in Western Australia repeating the same homophobic and racist taunts she heard around her. Though she was raised in a white family, she was dark-haired and dark-eyed and was often asked if she was Aboriginal--a suggestion she vehemently denied. It wasn't until she came out as a lesbian and left the racist and homophobic environment in which she was raised that she began to explore her ancestry. And that's when she uncovered the secret that her father's family had been hiding for three generations. In this upbeat tape from Australia, Lou Glover tells her own story as lesbian, one-time police officer, and recently-discovered Aboriginal woman.
About Louise Glover: "Black Sheep" is Louise Glover's first documentary. She has a varied background, including working on the Aboriginal and Islander Social Justice Commission, several years with the Federal Police and many years working as a waitress at a busy harbourside restaurant.

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PROGRAM #11
Plug - California, 11:13 minutes, 1998
Director: Meher Gourjian
Live-action meets digital animation and courtship merges with high-speed videogame in this retro-futurist tale of boy-chases-girl.

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The Last Time - Ireland, 13:55 minutes, 2002
Director: Conor Horgan
Intimations of mortality lead a middle-aged woman to take desperate action for the sake of a final intimate encounter.

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Asthma - New York, 2:20 minutes, 1995
Director: Martha Colburn
Fifties-era found footage is re-purposed to create a very different public service announcement about the effects of smoking.
About Martha Colburn: From the underbelly of Baltimore emerges the brilliant cinematic chaos of Martha Colburn. Mischievous and trigger happy with her Super 8 camera, Colburn creates a dazzling array of rhythmic visual montages as perverse as they are pleasurable. Utilizing collage images taken from pop culture ephemera, stylishly intermixed with clips of the grotesque, she transfers a raw, spastic energy onto film that is filled with both irony and humor to create a unique “Colburn” aesthetic. From screenings at high culture venues, such as museums, universities and festivals, to the seedy basements of lowly punk rock bars, Martha Colburn’s artistic vision has extended its appeal to diverse admirers with varying tastes and cinematic expectations. As a self-taught filmmaker living in downtown Baltimore, Martha Colburn has completed over 35 films since 1994. She toured the US and Europe with her "Helmo" projector and was featured in the New York Museum of Modern Art / San Francisco Cinematheque's Big As Life 8mm retrospective.  Her work is largely hand-colored, corrupted collage animation and features musical and spoken-word scores. Martha taught animation at the San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1999 and toured Europe with her films and scopitone collection in the Summer of 2000.  Most recently, she has been a participant artsist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

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PROGRAM #12
Mother Tongue - Australia, 6:00 minutes, 2002
Director: Susan Kim
Words and images coalesce to overcome space, time and memory as a girl struggles to find her way and to hold her far-flung family together.

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A Busy Man - Texas, 6:30 minutes, 2002
Director: James W. Johnson
Long on plans but short on execution, our hero manages to keep us engaged with the pure force of his verbal assault.

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Trilemma - California, 3:00 minutes
Director: Ye Won Cho
Ever have the feeling that you were unconsciously controlled and imprisoned by society's rules and economic demands?  Ye Won Cho felt like a puppet whose strings were being pulled, having to become something she did not want to be.  Her computer graphic animation film Trilemma is about this struggle.
About Ye Won Cho: Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Ye Won Cho earned her BFA in sculpture, and a BFA and MFA in Visual Communication design from Seoul National University.  She studied time-based moving images in the School of Visual Arts' Computer Art Program.  She is currently a Production Artist for Eyebeam Atelier, Inc. in New York

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Cubica - Austria, 4:00 minutes, 2001
Director: Michael Aschauer
Based on the control system of the popular computer game, Snake, this abstract three-dimensional computer animation is a product of the dichotomies of algorithmic automation versus manual manipulation, and randomness versus set action.   While the squares turn into cubes and the cubes join in chains, the pulses of a technoid soundtrack influence the "snake's" direction.  Cubica provides a fascinating scene for everyone who can appreciate formal precision and perfection.
About Michael Aschauer (m.ash): Born in 1977 in Steyr, Austria, Michael Aschauer studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and the Universitaet fuer Angewandte Kunst in Wien, Austria, where he currently lives and works.  A recent project list is available at http://m.ash.to for those interested.

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A Rilke Poem - North Carolina, 1:15 minutes, 2003
Director: Francesca Talenti
An animated interpretation of Rainer-Maria Rilke's poem, Sometimes a man. . .
About Francesca Talenti: Francesca Talenti holds a graduate degree in film production from the University of Southern California.  She teaches screenwriting, narrative production and animation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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I Reason - North Carolina, 1:00 minute, 2002
Director: Francesca Talenti
An animated interpretation of Emily Dickinson's poem by the same title.
About Francesca Talenti: See A Rilke Poem listed above.

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Rio Grande - North Carolina, 1:00 minute, 2003
Director: Francesca Talenti
An animated interpretation of a poem by Enrique Cabrera.
About Francesca Talenti: See A Rilke Poem listed above.

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Nonsense Poems - North Carolina, 2:30 minutes, 2003
Director: Francesca Talenti
Edward Lear, who wrote The Owl and the Pussycat, also wrote dozens of Nonsense Poems.  This animation interprets four of them.
About Francesca Talenti: See A Rilke Poem listed above.

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PROGRAM #13
For Our Man - New York, 24:48 minutes, 2002
Director: Kazuo Ohno
What starts out as just a narrative exercise soon takes on a life of its own.  The Author journeys far back into his past.  Issues of mortality begin to find their way into the strands of story he weaves.  And these strands in turn come together in a spectacular climax that results in Our Man's death.
About Kazuo Ohno: Kazuo Ohno grew up in Tokyo and New York and is a recent graduate of the Columbia University MFA Film program.  In addition to producing numerous short works of his own on video, he has worked as a director of photography, music composer, special effects person, and editor.  He currently lives in New York City with his filmmaker wife and their son and works as a director of commercials.  He is also developing a feature film project. For Our Man is his first project on film.

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