Athens Avant-garde Film Festival, Greece
Wednesday, November 12 - Sunday, November 23
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:
This program provides a panorama of American experimental films made in the 21st century and focuses primarily on feature length narratives (both fiction and documentary), together with a complement of shorts. Because these filmmakers lack the funding provided by Hollywood and "off-Hollywood" producers, they often struggle for long periods to complete their films. At the same time, the creative independence that they have been afforded provides the individual filmmakers with great freedom of expression. This talented group of artists, toiling mostly in solitude, created inspiring works that challenge, in thematic, structural, technical, and perceptual fashion, the manner in which we, as spectators, perceive the world at large.
Stylistically, the films in this retrospective series encompass found footage works, diverse hand-crafted animation techniques, live action movies that experiment with formal structure, as well as hybrid documentary and fiction forms. The contemporary artists in this program (while versed in the history of the avant-garde), are more consciously engaged with narrative cinema traditions, if only to then subvert them through their diverse storytelling strategies. They most frequently represent time and space in a manner that tends to disrupt the illusion of spatial and temporal continuity, and to foreground the experience of memory. Thematically, the films in this program incorporate reflections upon individual identity, the family structure, the fabric of the community, and the larger political culture, that are presented most often in critical and/or self-critical fashion. They directly address significant social issues, including the tragic events of 9/11, presidential politics and political resistance, the earth's ecology, human diaspora and race relations, and the myth of the post World War II nuclear American family.
Please see pages 34-45 of the Festival Catalog, viewable and downloadable as a PDF Document here:
