USA / 2001 / 10 mins
director DAVID LYNCH
australian premiere

What do you get when David Lynch dresses himself in a homeless bum’s beanie, sits himself in a deckchair in the sun and sucks down too much helium? If I be’s bein’ tellin’ ya, I’d spoil the film now bein’s I?

IRELAND / 2006 / 83 mins
director IVAN KAVANAGH
australian premiere

Recently dumped by his girlfriend for another man, working in a job he hates, things could be better for Peter. One night, while he is alone in his apartment, there is a knock at the door. His life will never be the same again.
What begins as a soap-opera narrative on the petty woes of the modern man’s working life, Tin Can Man unfurls with frightening rapidity as night falls until you are left fumbling, weeping in a Lynchian carnivale of depravity.
This surrealist merry-go-round is tempered with the character dynamics of Haneke, and the cinematography of Aronofsky.

We are proud to present upcoming Irish Filmmaker, Ivan Kavanagh and his new feature film on opening night!

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 18 mins
director PAUL WINKLER
nsw premiere

A slighty satirical look at cheap novelty items you might spend five minutes on, then forget about them. The film works on different layers; choose the one you like best.

USA / 2007 / 6.5 mins
director MARTHA COLBURN
australian premiere

A political fairy tale. Osama Bin Laden meets the Wizard of Oz. This film parallels the search for Bin Laden and the demonization of people in the witch trials.

AUSTRALIA/ 2005 / 1 min 51 sec
director WILLIAM MANSFIELD

Defaced is an experimental video piece utilising a synthesis of video footage and stop-frame animation. This piece explores the figurative expression of the face.

SPAIN / 2006 / 20 mins
director CRISTIAN POZO
australian premiere

Anonymous is a love story, a love in a daydreaming universe, with no time, no reference of any concrete place. Fred & Laura’s Love.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 10 mins
director SODA JERK
australian premiere

Picnic at Wolf Creek (2006) is a narrative remix video constructed entirely from samples lifted from iconic Australian film and music sources. This remix unearths the true story of what really happened to the school girls who disappeared from their fateful picnic at Hanging Rock in 1900. The all-star cast includes appearances by Steve Irwin, Russell Crowe, Ned Kelly, Lindy Chamberlain and the drag queens from Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

USA / 1994 / 9 mins
director LEWIS KLAHR

Lewis Klahr’s DOWNS ARE FEMININE unveils a kind of rainy day, indoor, peaceable kingdom of desultory and idyllic debauchery, masturbatory reveries and hermaphroditic transformations. Klahr’s oneric collages graft ‘70s adult film of pallid stubbly flesh flagrantly onto Good Housekeeping/Architectural Digest décor.

AUSTRIA / 2003 / 14 mins
director VIRGIL WIDRICH

Bits of found film and different types of animation illustrate a classic chase scene scenario: A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy’s secret headquarters.

AUSTRALIA / 2007 / 5 mins
director TONY LAWRENCE
australian premiere

Made from a collection of anonymous 1960s 8mm home movies that reveal the seductive allure of Hawaii.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 11 mins
director GEOFF WEARY
australian premiere

An experimental digital film. Captive explores the themes of repression, confinement and escape. As the historical Berlin Wall crumbles under the blows of street hawkers and souvenir hunters, ghostly specters from the past appear then dissolve back into the scratchy surface of a long forgotten newsreel.

USA / 2006 / 8 mins
director ABIGAIL CHILD
australian premiere

Reflections, refractions, formal play deconstructs narrative and locates the sub-version. Sex and class are refigured and exchanged: the princess becomes the maid; the maid becomes the queen. Funny, disturbing, and beautiful, Child discovers with digital printing ways to wreak havoc on our perceptions of the world.

USA / 2006 / 31 mins
director BILL MORRISON
australian premiere

An environmental meditation told in three parts, using distressed archival images from 1920s newsreels, and set to music by David Lang and Michael Gordon. Ancient newsreel footage of storms, floods and icebergs produce a combination of anxiety and awe when viewed in the wake of recent meteorological disasters.

AUSTRALIA / 2007 / 2 min 45 sec
director TREVOR WILLS
australian premiere

This film conveys some of the disturbing truths about uranium mining and that Nuclear Power is NOT a clean, green, carbon free solution to Climate Change. (The Sydney Underground Film Festival / Myspace winner).

IRAN / 2007 / 3 mins
director MAHMOUD YEKTA
australian premiere

A response to the latest invasion of Lebanon by the American-backed state of Israel, “Slogun” is an audio-visual experiment with slogan’s virus effect.

USA / 2007 / 113 mins
director GARY NULL
australian premiere

The US sent soldiers to Iraq, little did these soldiers know that their own government would inflict greater harm upon them than the enemy by exposing them to deadly chemicals, depleted uranium and radiation - all causing severe and often irreversible health problems and death while the government denies it all. This documentary exposes the truth about the War in Iraq, Gulf War Syndrome and the secrets the US government is hiding from the world at large.

USA / 2007 / 8 mins
director MARTHA COLBURN
australian premiere

An exploration of the visual and psychological parallels between the American western frontier and the conflict in the Middle East.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 2.5 mins
director ATANAS DJONOV
australian premiere

Experimental and observational video work, accompanied by a Russian version of “Varshavianka” – a Polish song written at the end of the 19th century, popular in Russia during the revolution of 1905 and 1917.

CANADA / 2006 / 25 mins
director KEN TAKAHASHI
australian premiere

A dramatic short exploring how far a reclusive man is willing to go to satisfy one of life’s most compelling drives: the drive to reproduce.

POLAND / 2006 / 30 mins
director RAFAEL KAPELINSKI
australian premiere

Katowice, Poland, 1982. The communist government has imposed Martial Law to crush the Solidarity movement. Food shortages and political arrests are everyday occurrences. Against this backdrop, a teenager falls in love for the first time.

USA / 2007 / 1 min
director ANGEL VASQUEZ
australian premiere

Exploring the cinematic experience of an encounter, pleasure, and resolution constructed by repetition and creation of an elliptical moment in time.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 3 mins
director RAMI FISCHLER

It’s just your average, everyday break up between a girl and her boyfriend.

AUSTRALIA / 2007 / 17 min : 3 sec
director ADRIAN ARCE

El Ñero, a remorseless Mexican homeless, travels to Australia for a one-day adventure trip looking for the soccer boots of his dreams. On his way he falls in love with a voluptuous lady and interacts with a series of bizarre characters and situations. It is a surrealistic, black comedy short inspired by Monty Python, Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati.

USA / 2006 / 10 mins
director MINJI KANG
australian premiere

“Her Smile” takes place in the Red District of South Korea. Sumi is a girl that wants love so desperately from the cold ruthless society that causes her to struggle so. Although she works as a prostitute, outside of her job she deals with situations that much of the world can relate to. This is not a story of a young prostitute rather a story about a girl who was left behind by the lack of love in her life and lives everyday struggling with her misconceptions of love, hoping for the best. Sumi attempts to find true love in this life by beginning ‘Her Smile’ getting ready for her “loves” arrival.

USA / 2006 / 2 mins
director DAVID WILSON
australian premiere

Encompasses the space between the eyes & the lips.

AUSTRALIA / 1996 / 6 mins
director CHRISTINA ANDREEF

In their apartment one night an inner-city couple catch something through the window.

DENMARK / 2006 / 10 mins
director SVEN VINGE MADSEN
australian premiere

Love/Rewind is an experimental take on `love’ in its purest essence. Two lovers are literally united as `one flesh’. But as they reach the very peak of their love, one existential question is left: Is this the beginning or the end?

USA / 2007 / 23 mins
director DANIEL SCHNEIDKRAUT
australian premiere

He spent a lot of time at our house when I was a kid, especially around the holidays.

USA / 2005 / 1 min
director DAVID FIRTH
australian premiere

It’s a very short piece about what Valentine’s Day means to me. Music by The Platters.

AUSTRALIA / 2005 / 3 mins
director JOHN GILLIES
australian premiere

A cinematic meditation upon land and landscape in the south east of Australia . The work is a postscript to John Gillies’ ‘Divide’ 2004 but this time emptied of sheep, horses and people.

UK / 2006 / 13 mins
director FAYE JACKSON
australian premiere

Every time Christine gets a lump removed, another appears. Increasingly disturbed, she begins to suspect that her surgeon is a lot less benign than her tumours.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 11 mins
director KATRINA GRAHAM
australian premiere

The most famous of Indonesian ghosts, the Kuntil Anak, tells the story of Raesita, the batik artist, whose heavy grief after the death of her husband draws the ghost to her. They seduce each other into a deadly dream world.

AUSTRALIA / 2007 / 2 mins
director RYAN LEECH
australian premiere

The title Vulcaniser plays on the word volcano and the Greek God of fire, Vulcan. It suggests a play of fragmentation attributable to the materialisation of information through technology. In this short art film, animation is made from stills shot off a television in real time and ‘in situ’.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 23 mins
director DEAN FRANCIS
australian premiere

A cat exterminator becomes obsessed with a strange feral boy and fights to save him from the fate of a hunted animal.

AUSTRALIA / 1966 / 3.5 mins
director ALBIE THOMS

A portrait of two women living in inner city Sydney.

USA / 1974 / 5 mins
director DAVID LYNCH

A fire. The room is cold. I will give you questions when the room is dim and you are still. Shut your eyes and you’ll burst into flames… So would say the Log Lady from Twin Peaks – a younger version is seen here, giving a slow piece to camera; black and white degraded images hinting at more below the surface. She hasn’t changed much and neither has Lynch since this very early work.

GERMANY / 2007 / 12 mins
director CHRISTIAN BREUER
australian premiere

A stranger appears from nowhere. Hunger driven, he makes his way to the city with its lure and enticement. He meets people, that have a unfulfilled yearning in their ordinary lives. Simply wanting to satisfy his needs, he provokes confrontation.

AUSTRALIA / 2004 / 4 mins
director JESSICA LOCKHART
australian premiere

Blessed is a four-minute experimental drama that explores the relationship between suffering and the healing power of prayer.

AUSTRALIA / 2007 / 6 min : 30 sec
director ANNABEL OSBORNE

A dark and twisted tale in the tradition of Roald Dahl. Worms in the cake mix? Budgies in the Blender? Wicked little Elouise just loves baking with her Mother for the local patisserie, but when Nasty Aunty B comes to look after her, things take a turn for the worse.

USA / 2007 / 6 min : 6 sec
director MAX MARGULIES, NAOKO MASUDA
australian premiere

Based on a Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tale, is the story of three creatures whose harmonious lives are interrupted by a series of unfortunate events. A stop-motion animation using real life organic materials & artificial figures.

AUSTRTALIA / 2007 / 4 mins
director DAVID PERRY
world premiere

This little film was entirely improvised as I sat in front of my computer using a Microsoft Windows font set, Photoshop, Premiere and cut to the music of the band Clarion Fracture Zone. And of course “dingbats” is what we say a crazy person is (without any prejudicial intent).

AUSTRTALIA / 2006 / 14 min : 48 sec
director RICHARD EAMES

This fuming anti-Howardian piece sees a young consumer wake from a 10 year coma to a nightmare landscape of hyper capital domination and an outrageous accumulated debt.

USA / 2007 / 3 min : 30 sec
director STEPHANIE MAXWELL, MICHAELA EREMIASOVA
australian premiere

The sensual persuasions of an imaginary world are conveyed utilising animated objects, cut outs, pixilation of live creatures, & hand-paintings on 35mm film stock.

AUSTRTALIA / 2004 / 45 sec
director WILLIAM MANSFIELD

This short animation explores the grotesque quality of fish guts and in turn attempts to illustrate their intricate beauty.

USA / 2007 / 5 mins
director RICKY SPRAGUE
australian premiere

Unable to achieve sexual climax, a man visits a strange doctor who shrinks him to microscopic size, and injects him into his own testicle. He discovers his sperm are protesting against ejaculation, and refuse to participate in his sexual endeavors until they have a chance to live as humans do.

AUSTRTALIA / 2006 / 1 min
director WILLIAM MANSFIELD
australian premiere

Witness is a stop-frame animation shot on the desolate main street of broken hill at night.

USA/ 2006 / 2 mins
director MARTHA COLBURN
australian premiere

Martha Colburn has amped up the political content of her stylistically raw and frenetic animations, this time concentrating on Male Pin-ups set to the dynamic music of Felix Kubin and Coolhaven. Sex and death are never far away, under the surface of the blushing bare chests and the celluloid.

UK / 2006 / 2 min : 32 sec
director YASMEEN ISMAIL
australian premiere

A peeved off measle wants to return to the days when disease wasn’t in competition with small arms and light weaponry as the number one threat to human life. Commissioned by Amnesty International.

USA / 2007 / 30 mins
director DAVID FIRTH
australian premiere

‘Salad fingers’ likes rusty spoons and to entertain 3 old friends for a fish dinner.

USA / 2006 / 1 min : 46 sec
director SCOTT GELBER
australian premiere

A stop-motion animated 3D photo cutout film, with a life-size armature reciting a poem about the internet, consumers, celebrities, and personal culture.

USA / 2007 / 10 min
director JI HYUN AHN
australian premiere

Because of a car accident, a family commits a crime against human morality. But no one blames them because of their own circumstances.

CANADA / 2006 / 4 min : 20 sec
director NOLAN
australian premiere

A coffee fanatic who can’t function normally without a few pots, so things go from bad to worse and his self-control is tested.

USA / 2006 / 2 min : 39 sec
director AMANDA BENT
australian premiere

Three kids learn a lesson in ‘fairness’ in this animated film.

USA/ 2007 / 1 min : 5 sec
director A.M. PETERS
australian premiere

A stop-motion film strictly crafted with elements found in an office setting such as PowerPoint slides, photo copies and fluorescent lighting.

USA / 2007 / 1 min : 18 sec
director DANIEL LUNDQUIST
australian premiere

This claymation explores how words can easily be twisted to mean something else.

SOUTH KOREA / 2006 / 4 min 10 sec
director JAEYOON PARK
nsw premiere

A visual ode influenced by the poem “evocation” written by Kim So Wol. The poem consists of strong emotional conflicts that occurs from losing a loved one.

USA / 2006 / 12 min : 50 sec
director ERIC PATRICK
australian premiere

The film functions as a deconstruction of spectatorship and authorship in the moving image… a puppet’s form tattered and decayed, hinting at the Protagonist’s delicate relationship with reality, voyeurism, the director and the apparatus.

USA / 2006 / 8 min : 30 sec
director BRAD SCHAFFER
australian premiere

With an ever-increasing desire to quit his job, Martin must suppress these urges and endure the stale environment – but the pettiest of tasks set him off in a way that is destructive not only to himself, but to the entire corporation he works for.

UK / 2007 / 12 mins
director MARTIN GAUVREAU
australian premiere

Joy and pain go hand in hand when an angelic being is delivered the box of eternity and subjected to the fateful decision of the gods.

GERMANY / 2007 / 3 mins
director ISABELLE McEWEN
australian premiere

‘Ground and Beds’ is based on a text out of Nelly Arcan’s novel ‘Whore’. A stunning looking very young woman speaks about beauty and about the power of beauty in our society. More fundamentally it is the sheer right to exist that she is addressing. The almost demonic image of her aging mother sits at the back of her mind and digs its claws deep into her. Only sarcasm seems to be waiting for her. She knows she can’t escape.

CANADA/ 2006 / 1 min 48 sec
director MICHELINE DUROCHER
australian premiere

Gearing up to perform, wearing a white retro bathing cap and silver eyelashes, the swimmer displays the sparkle of performance.

USA / 2007 / 16 mins
director TODD HERMAN
australian premiere

Somewhere between mourning and nurturing, Todd Herman’s film Cabinet maps an iconography of absence and what remains in memory and imagination.

CANADA / 2006 / 4 mins
director EVA RAMDOHR
australian premiere

Glyde has been alone in her small apartment for far too long. One night a strange guest comes knocking but that doesn’t matter to Glyde. She just sends the unwanted visitors next door.

NEW ZEALAND / 2006 / 5 mins
director JILL KENNEDY
australian premiere

A short animated film made to a real audio recording found on a telephone answering machine from 21 years ago.

CANADA / 2006 / 7 mins
dir. CHRIS KENNEDY, ANNA VAN DER MEULEN
australian premiere

An idiosyncratic look at staging in news photography, using materials from the archives of a Toronto Daily. Morals codes, delinquency, and autonomy are pulled into an altered coherence, as vintage photos are examined next to their type-written paper trail.

USA / 2005 / 11.5 min
director CSABA BERECZKY
australian premiere

A harrowing, hypnotic journey through the memory of a child’s eight birthday.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 14 mins
director LOREN WEBER
australian premiere

An exploration of subconscious thought bred by boredom and stagnation.

USA / 2006 / 17 mins
director DANIEL SCHNEIDKRAUT
australian premiere

A conceptual video project that uses traditional narrative film technique combined with unique visual and aural experimentation to tell the heroic story of a group of burn survivors during their first painful steps towards recovery.

USA / 2004 / 13 mins
director BILL MORRISON

A scene from The Bells (1926) is optically reprinted and edited to Michael Gordon’s 7-minute composition. A meditation on the fleeting nature of life and love, as seen through the decaying emulsion of the film.

UK / 2006 / 2 mins
director YOLANDA DE LOS BUEIS
australian premiere

Experience images that act as a trigger to desires, evoking a sense of the perverse or conjuring up fantasies. The materials have been dislocated from their original purpose and intention, revealing new readings, meanings and questions.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 4.5 mins
director Stephen Dunstan

Painted lips, painted trees, painted frames.

MEXICO / 1999 / 6 mins 30 secs
director NAOMI UMAN

Naomi Uman physically erases the female body from old 16mm adult film using nail polish remover and household bleach. This brilliant work is unusually precise: it is politically subversive, sassy & extremely funny.

GERMANY / 2005 / 12 mins
director DARK JOHANN FOTEREK
australian premiere

An abstract trip through a sleepless night.

AUSTRALIA / 2007 / 11 mins
director DIRK De BRUYN
australian premiere

Explores the gaps and intersections between analog and digital moving image manipulation. It focuses on recalling and re-shaping that lost materiality so critical to a cameraless direct-on-film practice.

AUSTRALIA / 1965 / 1.5 mins
director ALBIE THOMS
Animation DAVID PERRY

A handmade film animating Kurt Schwitters’ poem.

AUSTRALIA / 1967 / 2 mins
director ALBIE THOMS

A hand-made film, created by drawing on clear stock with an existing (found) soundtrack.

AUSTRALIA / 2007 / 10 mins
director SIMON RAY
world premiere

A film where the structural and the material elements of this film intersect with the content to create unyielding tension and anticipation.

AUSTRALIA / 2006 / 4.5 mins
director YASEMIN LOCKETT
australian premiere

Ominous characters collide with urban landscapes as tangled events playout in this glitched out experimental film noir.

USA / 1994 / 9 mins
director PEGGY AHWES

Color of Love is classic experimental cinema erotica and is found on the Other Cinema compilation, XPERIMENTAL EROS, which invokes a shimmering fantasia of celluloid sensuality for the pleasure of our largest sex organ - the brain. Ahwesh’s film is made by optically printing a found-footage vintage adult film, where the chemical rot threatens to censor the 70s adult film imagery.

USA / 1995 / 52 secs
director DAVID LYNCH

This film was made for the 100 year anniversary of the historical Lumière camera under the same conditions as the pioneers of modern cinema a hundred years ago. What comes out of David Lynch’s head is a flash of memorable brilliance in only 52 seconds: a subterranean threat of violence, torture and blood, veiled like a still pond with a gentle lyricism and surprising femininity.

USA / 2006 / 6 mins
director COURTNEY HOSKINS
australian premiere

In an inventive response to the cosmetics industry, Hoskins has created imagery from some unusual materials discovered while working as a sales assistant on a make-up counter.

GREECE / 2005 / 13 mins
director ANTONIS PAPANTONIOU
australian premiere

The wandering, the search, the contact, the disappearance. A man emerges from the ground. Unexplained flashes. Escape to nowhere. Observers arrive to examine the phenomena.

USA / 1994 / 5.5 mins
director MARK STREET

A smattering of repeated performances culled from old adult films and hand painted. A man bends over a body, but what we really notice is the texture of the wall behind him. A woman stares back at the viewer with annoyance. On the soundtrack Anais Nin declares: “but while I’m doing this I feel I’m not living.”

AUSTRALIA / 1966 / 1 mins
director ALBIE THOMS

A depiction of the contemporary world in which a one second image is stretched to 50 seconds and overlayed with rapidly changing split-screen images.

USA / 2007 / 93 mins
director GIL KOFMAN
australian premiere

THE MEMORY THIEF is the story of Lukas - an aimless, young man in contemporary L.A. who buries thoughts of his own past in the humdrum routine of a tollbooth clerk. A chance encounter with a Holocaust survivor suddenly brings into focus a world and an identity he embraces with frightening intensity - the victimized Jews of World War II. As he begins to enthusiastically act out his newfound obsession, Lukas discovers that survivor’s guilt isn’t just for the Jews anymore.
THE MEMORY THIEF is a mesmerizing, audacious psychological thriller in the tradition of TAXI DRIVER. The film was edited by Curtiss Clayton who cut To Die For, Drugstore Cowboy, Buffalo 66. It stars Mark Webber (The Hottest State, Broken Flowers) and Rachel Miner (Bully). THE MEMORY THIEF is a small, modest film in terms of production, that could have great lasting impact with its audience. It is both unique and provoking and is as relevant as ever to us in this time of senseless war.

We are proud to present Gil Kofman and his remarkable first feature film on closing night!