traveling festival

The Mesmerist
Bill Morrison. 2003. (JamesYoung, from The Bells, 1926) 16 min. 35mm. (U.S.)
World Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
From the maker of Decasia and The Film of Her (shown at the 1997 Mead Festival) comes a haunting new short work that reanimates a decaying nitrate print of a 1926 silent feature, The Bells, starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff. Based upon the play Le Juif Polonaise by Alexandre Chatrian and Emile Erckmann, which James Young adapted for the screen, The Bells was directed by Young and was reconceived, reproduced, and re-edited by Bill Morrison, with music by Bill Frisell.

The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa
Gregorio Rocha. 2003. 49 min. Video. (Mexico/U.S.)
U.S. Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
Intrigued by the legendary Mexican military leader Pancho Villa's little-known relationship with Hollywood, filmmaker and sleuth Gregorio Rocha goes on a search for lost footage that Villa commissioned from the American Mutual Film Company in 1914, allowing cameramen to follow him into war. The footage includes some of the first battle scenes captured in "moving pictures." Rocha documents his encounters as he scours the film vaults and back rooms of institutions across North America and Europe for the seven reels of film that immortalized Villa. His research unveils a legacy of fictional and documentary depictions of Villa dating from the silent film era, revealing a world unsure whether to venerate or to fear this imposing figure and the forces of popular revolution that he embodied.

Super 8 Mom
David Ellsworth. 2002. 5 min.Video. (U.S.)
New York Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
Casting home movies in a new light, David Ellsworth's interview with his mother is superimposed over footage taken during family vacations when the filmmaker was a child. The images Ellsworth's mother captured with her super-8 camera, while entirely innocuous at first glance, take on unexpected substance as they are incorporated into the context of an oral family history.

Si-Gueriki (The Queen Mother)
Idrissou Mora-Kpai. 2002. 62 min. 35mm. (Benin)
New York Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
The director returns home to Benin after ten years in Europe, hoping to interview his father, only to find that he has died. He then shifts his focus and begins to explore, for the first time, the lives of women in his own village. The result is an intimate look at a community caught up in the struggle between traditional female roles and women's self-determinism.

It's Not My Memory of It
Julia Meltzer, David Thorne.2003. 25 min. Video. (U.S.)
America's intelligence agencies have, over time, created an alternate universe of parallel truths in which reality does not necessarily correspond with public record. This experimental short examines the ways in which reality is submerged or hidden through secrecy and omission, practices that have intensified in the current climate of heightened security.

Beyond Sorry
David Vadiveloo. 2003. 53 min. Video. (Australia)
U.S. Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
When Zita Wallace was 8 years old, she became one of 60,000 Australian aboriginal and mixed-race children kidnapped by missionaries in order to be assimilated into white European culture. At age 62 she makes a decision to abandon her middle-class life in Alice Springs and return to the land, family, and community that once defined home.

Football Iranian Style
Maziar Bahari. 2001. 50 min. Video. (Iran)
U.S. Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
For Iranians both at home and abroad, Iran's soccer stars have attained the status of secular saints, worthy of emulation not only as athletes but as ambassadors to a world that many Iranians feel is prejudiced against their country. Touching on issues of national identity, the Iranian diaspora, and gender, Bahari's engaging film proves that soccer in Iran provides an outlet for personal passions and exuberant emotions that would otherwise go unvoiced.

Thunder in Guyana
Suzanne Wasserman. 2003. 50 min. Video. (Guyana/U.S.)
Combining biographical portrait with social and political history, this film illuminates an overlooked corner of recent history. The filmmaker's cousin Janet Rosenberg Jagan, born and raised in Chicago, was elected president of Guyana, South America, in 1997, becoming the first American-born woman to lead a nation. The film recounts the extraordinary life of Jagan, considered by many to be the "mother" of Guyana and a second Eva PerÛn, conveying as well the complex history of her adopted homeland.

Molly and Mobarak
Tom Zubrycki. 2003. 85 min.Video. (Australia)
U.S. Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
At the heart of this study of war, refuge, and national identity is the tale of a young man in love. Mobarak, an Afghani refugee in Australia, is torn between ties to his homeland and a young Australian woman with whom he forms a sometimes painfully close bond. Against the backdrop of a community divided by xenophobia, Mobarak struggles homesickness and outsider status in a culture radically different from his own.

Smile & Wave
Marijke Jongbloed. 2003. 91 min. 35mm. (The Netherlands/Afghanistan)
U.S. Premiere at 2003 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
The filmmaker follows a group of young men, part of the Dutch contingent of the UN's International Security and Assistance Force, to Kabul, Afghanistan, where they are charged with providing security and supporting the government in an effort to help citizens lead so-called normal lives. Through a blend of observational cinema and pointed interviews, a startling and complex portrait emerges of these soldiers, raising questions about the possibility of peacekeeping in a country that has been at war since before many of them were born.