News

The 14th annual Antimatter Film Festival in Vancouver, BC, Canada is an epic 9-day event of expanded cinema performances, feature-length documentaries an a ton of experimental short films and festivals.

There are seven feature documentaries screening including Marie Losier‘s hit The Ballad of Genesis & Lady Jaye, a profile of the pandrogenous entity, Breyer P-Orridge; and Chris Metzler & Lev Kalman’s popular Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, about the legendary ska punk band. Plus, there’s Adele Horne’s And Again and more.

On the expanded cinema front, Antimatter welcomes retrospectives of Kerry Laitala, who will be presenting a selection of her 3D light and motion experiments; and Roger Beebe will screen a series of multi-projector performances.

As for the short films, the real highlight of the fest is a screening of Jaimz Asmundson‘s trippy and powerful The Magus, a fictional/documentary hybrid of his father’s Satanic painting process.

Once again, the Wndx Festival of Film and Video Art will be celebrating the best in new and classic Canadian avant-garde, experimental and underground filmmaking with a little flair for the international thrown in. Wndx’s 6th annual edition is set to run on Sep. 29 to Oct. 2 in the city of Winnipeg.

This year, Wndx is paying special homage to two great Canadian artistic filmmakers: The late Joyce Wieland and Guy Maddin. For Wieland, the fest is holding two special retrospectives of the experimental filmmaker’s works spanning from 1965 to 1984. (Wieland passed away in 1998.) The first retrospective on Oct. 1 is a collection of all short films, such as Cat Food (1969) and A&B in Ontario (1984), which was co-directed with he contemporary Hollis Frampton. The second retrospective on Oct. 2 includes Wieland’s feature film Reason Over Passion (1969), plus two shorts.

From Sep. 2 to Oct. 1, Wndx is hosting Guy Maddin‘s Hauntings installation at the Platform Gallery.

The 18th annual Chicago Underground Film Festival is ready to have another monumental year at the Gene Siskel Film Center on June 2-9, featuring a killer lineup with new films from some true underground legends.

First, Usama Alshaibi will screen his latest, most visually stunning and conceptually innovative feature Profane, about a spiritually confused Muslim sex worker trying to recapture her lost jinn — a demon of smokeless fire — on streets of the Windy City.

Then, documentary filmmakers Jeff Krulik and John Heyn return to their hard rockin’ roots with Heavy Metal Picnic, which relives one of the most notorious ’80s weekend parties in the history of Maryland and the world — the Full Moon Jamboree, which if you can remember it means you weren’t there. Plus, Hmp will be screened with Heyn and Krulik’s underground classic Heavy Metal Parking Lot.

Also in the documentary vein, are Marie Losier‘s...

The 6th annual Montreal Underground Film Festival presents 3 nights of wild and wooly short films from around the world at various venues around the city on May 12-14.

The fest kicks off with a lineup of 8 short films, plus the World Premiere of Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare’s Main Attraction, about a magician and his resident freaks fending off an eviction from their home. DeGiglio-Bellemare is a member of the Montreal media arts collective Volatile Works and features special effects by underground artist Rick Trembles and Andy Mauro. Also in the Opening Night kick-off is the not-to-be-missed hilarious music video Goths! On the Bus by Karen & Jaimz Asmundson.

Then, the fest continues on the 13th and the 14th with several programming blocks of short films hailing from Canada, the U.S., Germany, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Finland, the U.K. and other countries.

Some standouts in the fest include Zachary Epcar‘s...

Every year, the student-run Milwaukee Underground Film Festival shows off a collection of world-class experimental and avant-garde films, screening work from some of today’s most acclaimed filmmakers. This year’s stellar event will take place on May 6-8 and will screen at several venues, including Uwm’s Union Theatre, the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts and Uwm/Psoa Kenilworth Square East.

Included in the lineup, which is printed in full below, are two films by prolific experimental animator Jodie Mack, Unsubscribe #1: Special Offer Inside and Unsubscribe #4: The Saddest Song in the World; Kerry Laitala‘s eye-popping ChromaDepth experiment Afterimage: A Flicker of Life (Version 2); Self Improvement by Clint Enns, one of Canada’s finest filmmakers; Zachary Epcar‘s haunting architecture study, A Time Shared Unlimited; and Steve Cossman‘s Jive.

Serving on this year’s jury are film professor at the University of Florida, Roger Beebe...

On April 19 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, the Ata Film & Video Festival will be hosting a special springtime retrospective screening celebrating their 5th anniversary, pulling together films from each year they’ve been in operation. The festivities start at 7:30 p.m.

As a program of the Artists’ Television Access non-profit center, which began in the early ’80s, the Film & Video Festival was founded in 2006 and has always been run by co-directors and programmers Isabel Fondevila and Shae Green. In it’s brief history, the fest has quickly become one of the most significant experimental media events in the world. Each year, they screen a diverse range of cutting edge, avant-garde, playful and artistic short films and videos from an international pool of filmmakers.

In addition to the annual festival in San Francisco, held in October of every year, Fondevila and Green have also toured the world with...

The 24th annual Images Festival is once again overstuffed with experimental and avant-garde media goodness. From March 31 to April 9, Toronto will be overrun with film & video screenings, live cinema performances, artist talks, gallery installations, forum discussions and more.

The fest opens with Rivers and My Father — a documentary and fictional narrative blend that explores the family stories of filmmaker Luo Li — and ends with a live hardcore music soundtrack accompanying Todd Brown’s classic silent movie West of Zanzibar.

In between that, there are artist talks with John Gianvito, Paul Clipson, Mario Pfeifer, Beatrice Gibson, James MacSwain, Steve Reinke and others; several programs exploring the state of cinema in Africa; live cinematic performances by Andrew Lampert, Ellie Ga, Lindsay Seers, Icaro Zorbar and more.

Plus, don’t forget the experimental film & video screenings, including John Gianvito’s documentary essay Vapor Trails (Clark); and short works by Jodie Mack, Lewis Klahr,...

The second night of the 5th annual Ata Film & Video Festival groups its short films under the heading “Lo-Fi Future,” which couldn’t be more apt for this selection.

Several of the films are literally just that, lo-fi visions of the future. Without any special effects whatsoever, these films tell us they take place in the future either just verbally, or through just shooting at unique locations. Other films, though, explore the “future” in a different way, by showing the effect progress has on culture, but through abstract means.

Wasteland, dir. Kathleen Quillian. Quillian brilliantly uses cut-out animation to illustrate the modern food chain, which starts from crop dusting fields and ends with automobiles blowing exhaust into the atmosphere. In between, cows are injected with hormones then are decapitated and chubby suburbanites pig out on hamburgers until they need to control their cholesterol with prescription medication that they wash down with beer.

The 5th annual Ata Film & Video Festival in San Francisco is just a brief two-night affair, but is packed with more experimental and avant-garde filmmaking power than can be imagined. The fest explodes this year on Oct. 21-22.

Once again, the fest is a heady mix of local Bay Area favorites with filmmakers from all over the world. As for the locals, Paul Clipson will screen his newest, most epic work, Union; along with new animated weirdness from Kathleen Quillian; work by political mixologist Bryan Boyce; and an astounding Film/Video hybrid by Kerry Laitala made in Chromadepth. (In case you were worried, Chromadepth glasses will be provided.)

Other films come from nearby locations, such as Sam Barnett and Vera Brunner-Sung of Los Angeles; and Jeff Guay and Karl Lind of Portland. But others come from such far-flung places, such as The Netherland’s Maite Abella and Brooklyn’s Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman.