MILKBAR 2008 INTERNATIONAL LIVE FILM FESTIVAL

Title: Finding Aurora / Carolina Backman, George Cremaschi, Lucy HG, Emma Nordanfors, , Rugar

Synopsis: What were our favorite moments from childhood? What were our nightmares? What about the children of the other lands and their memories? A 2D animation made up of collages from illustrations, drawings, etchings and photographs.

Nazli Eda Noyan was Born in Izmir, 1974, studied design on scholarship and earned her bachelor and master degrees at Dokuz Eylul University, Bilkent University and University of Florida. Daghan Celayir, born in 1978, finished his studies in visual arts and visual communication design in Bahcesehir University, Istanbul Turkey.

Synopsis: Using hand animation on live film, the film explores the imperfection of revisiting what is lost.

Cara Marisa Deleon received her MA in film studies from the University of Iowa and her MFA in film production from Savannah College of Art and Design. She is an experimental artist who explores the body, women and ideology within time-based media. Her work has been shown through out North America and Europe. She currently lives in Chico, California and is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at California State University, Chico.

Synopsis: Maybe it’s the CIA and the LSD they gave “Richard,” or America and its vast imagery screwed into our brains and restructuring our identity. Whatever “it” is, get ready for a found footage film that deconstructs the mighty power of narratives and their pervasive effect on the formation of consciousness. The film has screened and received awards at many festivals and venues, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Cinema Texas, Anthology Film Archives, New York Underground, Tribeca Film Festival and the New Orleans Film Festival, where it won Best Film in the festival.

Tony Gault is currently working on a film about language and how it influences our perception of reality.

He is also one of five candidates selected for President Bush’s manned Mars expedition.

Synopsis: Experimental Film Art/ Physical Theatre “Nobody’s Pet” returned with the “Best International Avant Garde Film” award from the New York International Independent Film Festival 2007 and after over 50 screenings, it is now in the Cannes Film Festival Catalog 2008.

Born in 1980. She graduated from MSU Istanbul State Conservatory of performing Arts in 2001.

Aysegul Guryuksel is a choreographer, performer, and founder of subvoid. In 2006, She created an evening length work and later on with her strong interest in editing, she decided to transform her stage-art work into an experimental film-art production with this film, she has become an award winning director in New York

Synopsis: Claudia and Paul is an experiment to discover what artistic event would occur if we could see all the activity around us in the next couple of minutes juxtaposed. Would our actions appear more meaningful? Would a hidden choreography suddenly emerge? Is the motion around us better observed by extending our memory into the past and future simultaneously?

Henry Gwiazda is a composer/new media artist. Since 1986, he has worked with sampling and sound effects to create a unique musical language that is derived from the interior musical characterizes of noise itself. His recent work is concerned with creating with creating immersive musical works and computer multimedia. Performing live with sampler, guitar, and tape, he has given concerts, workshops, and lectures throughout the united states, Canada, and Europe.

Synopsis: In this short animation Daily routine motivates the modern day woman to take a trip around the world.

Sarah Klein’s work examines the contrast between the domestic and public worlds. In her videos, drawings and performances, she explores the conduct and codes that define these two realms. Sarah received and MFA from Mills College, Oakland California (1999) and has exhibited her work widely in galleries and museums, on television, and in film festivals.

Title of Film: I look forward to it and " I was never glamorous, I was just around" (2006)

Synopsis: A short conversation between two people sharing the screen yet situated seven decades apart. Rotary phone to mobile phone, this brief exchange comments on the passing of time and the evolution of technology.

Synopsis: A short mediation on balance, preservation, time and technology. This diptych connects images of an old woman walking with a cane (shot with a cell phone) to images of her former youthful self skating with friends seventy years earlier (shot on 16mm film in the 1930s)

Ellen Lake received her MFA from mills College in Oakland, California in 2002, where she studies sculpture, film & video, and installation. She is currently working on a body of work incorporating images from cell phone and digital media with clips from 16mm films from the 1930s and 40s. She was the recipient of Bay Area Video Coalition’s 2005 Mediamaker Award. Work from this series has been shown at the Walker Art Center, Exit Art, Crawl Underground Film Festival and Madcat film Festival, CyberArts Festival, and Axiom Gallery. Additional work has been shown internationally at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Center for Digital Art in Holon, Israel.

Synopsis: ‘The Other Image’ attempts to isolate some of the different images that lead through to a moment of perception, and seek to bring them into dramatic conflict.

Synopsis: In this very short simple piece, a spotlight is moved over a jar of American coins. The glare of the light blossoms and fades over the curves of quarters and pennies shot using a tiny CCTV wireless camera.

There’s something paradoxical about the treatment of the money in this vide. The piece is clearly fetishistic as it fixes on the shiny surfaces of the coins in the light; the tiny camera makes the coins seem larger than normal. But the dirty degraded images, the burnt-out glare and the dark recesses of the pile all imply something unpleasant. The grand American symbols on the coins are belied by the dank, grubby visual treatment of these now-worthless pennies.

Synopsis: In Pursuit of Elvis (Elvis’ Blow Job) explores Elvis’ in terms of sexuality and performance, Elvis describes the thrill of performance and the receiving of blow jobs at the end as a reward, but Elvis is in drag and the gender of the performer contradicts what Elvis is saying, questioning the performative nature of sexuality and the purpose of performance.

Kate Pelling is a UK based artist who uses language, costume, video, drawing and theoretical research.

Ongoing project ‘In Pursuit of Elvis’, consists of a multidisciplinary sketchbook using Fine Art, Queer theory, Performance theory and Psychology, all of which form a body of work due to be completed in 2008. Kate Pelling has exhibited her work internationally; she studied at Birkbeck, University of London in October 2008

Synopsis: “This is a dance” is performance-based piece that examines and deconstructs both the space and time of the dances as it happens. By incorporating both ore-recorded and live video feed, the piece expands the “stage” space while utilizing technology to create time delays. The live video feed is sent through a laptop and maintained by Christian Gainsley during the performance.

Sarah Sass earned a BFA in modern dance and choreography from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. In 2002, she formed peck peck dance ensemble (PPDE) in collaboration with Sean McMahon. Christian Gainsley has been living in San Francisco since 2003 and playing in video art just as long.

Synopsis: ‘Flower Fall’ is a meditation on vibration and color, Inspired by the chakra system.

Super-8mm Ektachrome film has been hand-processed, optically printed on to 16mm Ektachrome, and hand printed again.

This film is designed to bring viewers into the moment – as art and meditation.

Laura Zaylea holds an MFA in Film from San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in Art-Semiotics from Brown University.

Her single-frame animated films cherish the spontaneity and intimacy of hand processing in and optical printing techniques, And her “queer girl magic movies” celebrate the quirky psychology of introverted characters and the gritty, colorful texture of video pixels. LZ sees her moving image work as an offering: a landscape to dream into, a breath-rate to get you there, and colors and characters to play with when you arrive.

ABOUT St. Petersburg’s Open Cinema Festival:
The Open Cinema Festival is a partner festival to the MilkBar, and is run by the Bereg Art Center in St. Petersburg. It features some of the best new experimental film from St. Petersburg and across Russia.

Past selections have included unique performance collaborations such as Islands by the Russian Butoh group Derevo, and Cigaretta by AKHE theatre, as well as animated shorts such as Lullabies by Liza Skvorcova, Bed by Masha Sharafutdinova, and The First Round Dance by Maria Godovannaya among others.

This year we are showing the St. Petersburg experimental film program of the 2007 Open Cinema Festival. Featured artists in the program include In Scale by Tatyana Moshkova;Air by Stas Bulov; The Black The White by Andrey Bakhurin; and the controversial documentary Allowed Limits by Natalya Mihailova. Films will be introduced briefly by Katya Madrid, a former bay area artist and art historian now based at St. Petersburg’s European University.

ABOUT Helsinki, Finland’s Love and Anarchy Independent Film Festival
Helsinki International Film Festival - Love & Anarchy is a non-competitive film festival held yearly in September since 1987,. The festival promotes the artistry of filmmaking, through screening the most inventive, visually stunning and controversial new films, revealing the promising talents of tomorrow. Under the title of Love & Anarchy the festival harbors the bizarre, the strange and the controversial. The Helsinki Film Festival is the biggest and most accessible film festival in Finland and enjoys wide media coverage.

The 20th edition of Love & Anarchy – came to a grand finale on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 as the festival reached its audience record of 45,500 visitors. The Band Sigur Rós in Bio Rex, opened with a live acoustic set and also closed the evening with live music to a screening of Home. (by who?) The 20th edition of HIFF ended with a standing ovation which sealed the closing of the festival. www.hiff.fi

Finnish shorts being shown include
Polle (Horsie) by Sara Wahl;
Pyongyang Robogirl by Jouni Hokkanen, Simojukka Ruippo;
Lauantai (Saturday) by Anna Virtanen

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ABOUT Irina Evteeva Retrospective
This year we are presenting the first North American showing of a retrospective of Irina Yevteyeva’s (Evteeva) hand painted animation films. A director, animator and professor of cinema history in St. Petersburg, she creates hand-made screen pictures in the literal sense of the word. She is a senior scholar at the Russian Institute of History of the Arts, professor of Cinema and Photographic Arts of Saint-Petersburg State University of Cinema, and a director at Lenfilm Studios. Her Films include Clown, w/ Sacha Polunin, Demon (shown at Cannes/2006), St.Petersburg, and more. Her films enjoy wide notoriety and respect in the international film world, yet are rarely seen here. We are very pleased to be able to offer this sizeable showing of her work. Many of these works have never been screened in the US before.

Finding Aurora by League of Imaginary Scientists including Carolina Bäckman (performance), George Cremaschi (composer), Lucy HG(video), Emma Nordanfors(dance), Rugar (composer)

He lived a double life. Did this make him a liar? He did not feel like a liar. He was a man with two truths. - Iris Murdoch
You are invited to participate in Finding Aurora, an interactive research project by Scandinavian choreographer Emma Nordanfors, Swedish movement artist Carolina Bäckman, and Lucy Hg from the League of Imaginary Scientists. Through performed media and movement, Finding Aurora engages audiences in the indeterminate process of creative inquiry. Finding Aurora previewed in Berlin as an open study at Tanzfabrik in 2007 and unravels again in the 2008 MilkBar International Live Film Festival and for Electrofringe. Finding Aurora is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Danish Arts Council, and is under the administration of Projektcentret, Dansens Hus in Denmark.See http://www.imaginaryscience.org/findingaurora

Based out of Denmark, Germany, and the United States, the creative researchers of Finding Aurora are actively searching. The project reveals the ambiguous lines of definition that determine the boundaries of choreography or limit the expression of movement. The collaborating artists challenge the definition of action with alternating contexts and their fluid consequences. For this project, dance choreographer Emma Nordanfors acts as thought coordinator and media artist Lucy Hg becomes a context builder, while movement artist Carolina Bäckman moves through scenery and characters as your guide for Finding Aurora.

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short films about water / submarine revisited by Ian Winters (film) and Evelyn Ficarra(composer)

Embedded in the age-old (and present) fascination with sea – visually and sonically mapping place-specific worlds of water, shipwreck, geography, listening and loss, this multi-year work in progress debuts at this year’s festival. Based around time-lapse films shot at noted sea-faring locations around the world which are widely expected to be changed radically over the coming decades, it is envisioned as a multi-channel video and acoustic installation/ immersive environment. It explores the human relations to the sea - above and below the surface while being controlled in part by interactive data streams such as the rate of melt of the Greenland ice sheet, and the shipping traffic in ports. The piece is inspired by the physical characteristics of under, over, ebb and flow as well as the now-rising waters’ intersection with the human world of memory, shipwreck, and transformation at sea. It is an intersection of Winter’s project short films about water and ficarra’s submarine revisited. The work is supported by a residency at I-Park. See www.shortfilmsaboutwater.org and www.evelynficarra.com.

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Dutch Classic by Eric Koziol (film), Matthias Bossi(composer/performer), paige starling sorvillo (choreographer)

On the eve of his elementary-school reunion, a man known-only-to-himself as Cowboy Madge engages the man-servant Dutch and his rudimentary time machine to induce memories of a 4th grade spelling bee in a desperate attempt to rekindle relations with his old flame Misty Window. Drenched in Oakland California’s toxic milkshake of an urban landscape, Dutch Classic is a rump-shaking good time only minorly disguised as one maniac’s coming of age romance turned mid-life crisis. This roof-top charade/tango lesson is brought to you by filmmaker Eric Koziol, choreographer paige starling sorvillo and composer Matthias Bossi with special guest stars Bethany Clemen and Moe! Staiano. For more information on Koziol see http://homepage.mac.com/ek.co/Menu1.html , on sorvillo http://blindsightperformance.org/ , on bossi http://www.sleepytimegorillamuseum.com/

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A Clear Story Merlin Coleman (composer) and Katherin McInnis (film). Merlin Coleman and Katherin McInnis pair up with a film called A clear Story. An exploration of a decaying folk art landmark, Grandma Prisbrey¹s bottle Village incorporates a soundscape of lost voices and cello's, broken pianos and found sound. In this new collaboration developed for the festival composer Coleman continue’s her trademark work. Working with cello, voice and soundscape "Merlin Coleman presents a devastating confection of lilting vocals, somber strings, unruly language... reminiscent of Meredith Monk crossed with Flannery O'Connor on mushroom tea.", S.F. Weekly. For more about the artists see www.merlinman.com and www.katherinmcinnis.com

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Modern Times, Dan Plonsey(composer) and ensemble, Liz Allbee (Film). Dan Plonsey’s live Ensemble of 8, Daniel Popsicle will play a live soundtrack for Allbees’ film Modern Times, a comical race against the clock up and down an escalator, set off by Plonsey’s uncatagorizable live music, characterized by a dogged determination to be as un-abstract as possible. Noted musicians from El Cerrito's Daniel Popsicle ensemble create a live evolving sonic world for Albee’s film work, Modern Times.