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Experimental Cinema Group was ushered in by Carla Selby and Gladney Oakley and was later carried forward by Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage. It is now called First Person Cinema and the curator is Don Yannacito. This program was started in 1955 with the intention of bringing an awareness of the personal cinema to Boulder, and has become a highly respected international showcase for the makers of personal film. It is the longest existing program in the world that has been continually screening avant-garde film and video work.

The Stan Brakhage Film Series will continue to show films by Brakhage on the first Sunday of every month at 7:30pm in ATLAS 100. All shows are free and open to the public.

MOST SCREENINGS ARE MONDAYS AT 7:00 PM IN THE VISUAL ARTS COMPLEX AUDITORIUM 1B20 / ADMISSION IS $3.00

Student Award Showcase

Student Award Showcase

Monday, February 3, 2014
7:00 PM

Winners of The Grillo Awards

Made possible with funds from the Arts and Cultural Enrichment Fee. Free admission. The Grillo awards are designed to encourage excellence in filmmaking and help defray some of the expenses required to pursue a degree in film production. A total of up to $17,000 of Grillo funds is distributed each year to four tiers of production students. Final recipients and individual award amounts will be determined each semester by in-class student votes and a panel of judges made up of CU Film Studies faculty and outside professionals. A selection of award winning films will be shown one night only. The Grillo Awards are drawn from a University of Colorado Foundation fund set up in the early ‘90s by the founder and former Director of the CU Film Studies Program, Virgil Grillo (1938-1994), whose dedication and vision helped shepherd Film Studies from its modest beginnings in the 1970s to an undergraduate degree program with some 600 majors.

Ladia Lertxundi

Ladia Lertxundi

Monday, February 17, 2014
7:00 PM

Laida Lertxundi (Bilbao, 1981) makes films with non-actors, landscapes and sounds. She will be sharing her recent works.

“Lertxundi resists easy categorization. Her works could be described as landscape films, set as they are against the backdrop of Southern California’s deserts and mountains, its blue skies and wild shores. These environments are sparsely populated with non-actors, who are sometimes wandering, sometimes still. Sequences are repeated and reframed, calling back to one another; recorded music plays within the world of the film, taking on the character not of a soundtrack but of a field recording. Narratives are hinted at, flirted with, yet never realized. Her films function as both exactingly arranged experiments with the syntax of film language and lovesick daydreams, fragmented and full of longing.” (Whitney Biennial 2012)

“Rather than using emotion to drive a narrative as in a conventional melodrama, Lertxundi treats feeling as a material, a color or tone that can be broken down, pulled apart, and recombined with other cinematic elements such as rhythm, light, and sound....Emotion is loosed in Lertxundi’s films and it suffuses the environs like the Los Angeles smog: enigmatic, undirected, and capable of intensifying the late-day light with brilliant hues.” (FQ, Genevieve Yue)

Black Maria Film and Video Festival

Black Maria Film and Video Festival

Monday, March 3, 2014
7:00pm at Naropa University Performing Arts Center

Since 1981, the annual Black Maria Film and Video Festival, an international juried competition and award tour, has been fulfilling its mission to advocate, exhibit and reward cutting edge works from independent film and video makers. With previous Oscar nominated and international award-winning shorts, the festival is widely known for its National Public Exhibition Program, which remains loyal to featuring a variety of bold contemporary works drawn from the annual collection of 50 award winning films and videos. Now in its 32nd year, the Black Maria Festival distinguishes itself as a cornerstone for artists to express the inventive, insightful, and uncommon spirit. Festival Director John Columbus will present a program of the 2014 winning shorts ranging from a variety of narrative, animation, documentary, and experimental.

Talena Sanders

Talena Sanders

Monday, March 10, 2014
7:00 PM

Liahona is Talena Sanders’ first feature length film. It is an experimental documentary examining the culture, history, and lived experience of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often referred to as the Mormon faith. The film creates a portrait of Mormonism through documentation of LDS cultural dominance in Utah, the suppressed history of folk magic in the early church, landmark Mormon life experiences, and Sanders’ personal history and connection to the church. Sanders holds an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University and a BFA in Art Studio from University of Kentucky. Her work has been screened, exhibited and collected internationally, including at the New York Film Festival Views from the Avant-Garde, Crossroads at San Francisco Cinematheque, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Lódz Culture House's Galeria Imaginarium in Lódz, Poland, Chelsea Museum of Art in New York, NY, Above Second gallery in Hong Kong, International Forum Art Tech Media in Cordoba, Spain, Contemporary Art Center in Naples, Italy, and Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Lynne Sachs & Mark Street

Lynne Sachs & Mark Street

Monday, April 7, 2014
7:00 PM

After a twenty-year hiatus, New York experimental filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs return to Boulder to present some of their most recent films. Street will screen four works from his collection Tales of Urban Fascination. These films trace the vagaries of city drift: from tactile interventions on 35mm theatrical trailers found in the trash, to a kaleidoscopic reverie where public and private moments clash across the screen, to the mysterious, aqueous wonders of the Fulton Fish Market. Together, Street’s films create a charged tapestry of life in the city. “Combines the strengths of the city symphony and the experimental film to convey the weirdness and fresh humanity of daily life.” (Phillip Lopate)

Sachs' hybrid documentary “Your Day is My Night” begins with a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown where a household of immigrants share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues and a theatrical movement piece. “A strikingly handsome, meditative work that immerses you in an entire world that you might unknowingly pass on the corner of Hester Street, unable to guess what’s behind the fifth-floor windows.” (Stuart Klawans, The Nation)

Graduate Student Showcase

Graduate Student Showcase

Monday, April 21, 2014
7:00 PM

Taylor Dunne was born in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and spent her formative years working at historic instutions of avant-garde filmmaking in NYC. She embraces the medium of film not simply as a means to recreate the real world, but as a tool for creating the extraordinary. Her favorite color is green.

Mark Banzhoff is an interdisciplinary artist based in Boulder, Colorado working in video, sound, and live performance.

Usama Alshaibi was born in Baghdad, Iraq and spent his formative years living between the United States and the Middle East. His work is about foreigners in a foreign land.

Michael Davis is from Hartford CT. He makes films for the narcolyptic insomniac within us all. His favorite color is red.

Taylor McIntosh is from the planet Earth. His still and moving images lie somewhere within the realm of documentary.

Eric Stewart is Chicago born filmmaker whose work traces the political, social and mystical histories embedded within landscapes and systems. His current work documents the confluence of rivers, estuaries, and dams to explore notions of borders, statehood and ecology.

Dani Franklin is from New Haven CT, and has lived in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Beijing. Her work explores experimental documentary forms and is heavily influenced by mythology, queer theory, and social and ecological activism.