Mónia Camacho of Portugal made this short science fiction piece about a fragmentary broadcast from an alien artificial intelligence. There’s some talent here. The film is made in the simplest possible fashion but conveys some interesting emotions and ideas. I think the film should be expanded into something quite a bit longer. The odd, almost out of place expressions of the character make me curious. I want the AI to ramble on for a while. That final landscape shot is fantastic. You could almost take this short film and drop it right into a Tarkovsky film like Solaris. It would fit.
Category Archives: Underground Film
Downtown 81 – A Film Starring Jean Michel Basquiat
Mature Content:
This is a 1980 film starring American artist Jean Michel Basquiat. It follows him around and through the downtown New York art and music scene, presenting real people and events in a barely fictionalized semi-documentary. It’s a fascinating look into the world of 1980 New York and the quickly rising star painter who was to pass away in 1988. It’s a glimpse of a New York just a few years before it was bombed by The Gap. It was directed by Edo Bertoglio.
You can stare straight into the open face of Basquiat and find more mystery than Banksy could conjure with a black velvet cloak, top hat and a mask.
Red Riding Hood Meets Frankenstein – A Film by Ricky Lewis Jr.
Here’s a humorous tribute to the Universal horror films of old. It was directed by Ricky Lewis Jr. and features a forest, an inn, Frankenstein, Red Riding Hood, an invisible man, vampires, fog and various comedic chills. The production has a large cast who give themselves over entirely to the mood of the piece. There’s a nice underground vibe to the proceedings and the effects are surprisingly good.
Monologue Under White Light! – A Film by Samira Eskandarfar
A ravishing beauty from Iran! Look at this mysterious and subtle film by director Samira Eskandarfar. Her figures drift through time and space in a stage setting that seems open-ended and universal. The underlying themes and messages are probably far more complex than I can ascertain without a proper understanding of Iranian culture. But the film stands as a mysterious and slightly harrowing glimpse into the progress of attraction, love and communication between individuals. The characters, played by Kazem Sayahi Saharkhiz and Faranak Miri, engage in mundane conversation, offer each other drinks, smoke cigarettes, make eyes at each other, play music on a tape recorder and disappoint each other in all the little ways of a normal life. But they seem symbolic of something greater and perhaps very much to do with the filmmaker’s Iran. There are some amazing artists working with enormous expressive power in Iran. Samira Eskandarfar is one of them.
By the way, the filmmaker is also a painter.
Visit the filmmaker’s web site.
The Last Harvest – A Film by Heidi Phillips
Canadian experimental filmmaker Heidi Phillips made this little ghost story film that could almost as easily be called a memory film. Mike Everleth over at Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film has some good comments in his review of the film.
Culture Shock, Level One – A Film by Bill Mousoulis
Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film posted a film by Bill Mousoulis called The Experimenting Angel. I liked it. So I’ve posted another of Mousoulis’ films. It features Jennifer Levy who returns from a long absence to Australia and feels dislocated while visiting a city. She wonders why the people seem so ‘deflated’ as they wander through various public/corporate spaces like malls. The film captures something increasingly common worldwide which is that quiet, blank, but seemingly normal behavior encouraged by any structure designed and erected with a corporate idea behind it. We all know how we are expected to behave when we walk past a row of Gaps, Starbucks, Banana Republics and Wetzle’s Pretzels. We obey. We perform the routine and go about our business making sure that we are perceived as correctly normal. We are guests in someone else’s house, even in our public spaces. We behave like new guests, ingratiating ourselves to the dome camera in the ceiling. The cell phone is the absolute symbol of complete obeisance to the corporate superstructure looming above us. We are told to engage in meaningless chatter while we walk, drive, breathe, eat, date, watch movies, run, bike, and work. We are told to do this until it seems like normal and seems to make perfect sense. It is as logical as being told to drop a penny on the ground every third step for every day of your life. Steve Jobs tells you to leave him a penny on the ground every third step of every day of your life… and you damn well do it. You know how many times Steve Jobs uses a cell phone during an average day? None. Why? Because he’s much smarter than you are.