On Monday, November 10, Flaherty NYC will be presenting the second installment of its new screening series at 7:30 at Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Avenue in the East Village). Alison Kobayashi and Sylvia Schedelbauer were two of the guest artists at the Flaherty in June. Schedelbauer, half-Japanese, half-German, has been making short films that explore historical narratives in the context of very personal, psychological treatments using found and archival footage to create haunting and lyrical pieces. Her work is aesthetically quite beautiful and emotionally riveting. We're showing two works of hers, Remote Intimacy (a still from this piece, pictured), an eight-minute meditation on dreams, nightmares and desire; and Memories, a 19-minute film that creates a complicated family lineage and heritage that she has shaped into a very personal construction of identity, memory and history between her Japanese self and her German self, again gorgeous, haunting and emotionally subversive.
In a very, very different vein, half-Japanese, half-Canadian video maker, Alison Kobayashi, explores some of the same terrain. However, instead of using found footage, this very young, Tracey Ullman-esque performance artist uses her own face and body to transform herself into a myriad of personalities to tell her stories. We're showing a piece called Alex to Alex, an hilarious and quite moving six-minute video where she plays the roles of two teenage boys. She explores their relationship, as she imagines it, based on a love letter she found on a highway overpass, a missive from a "mostly gay" fourteen year old who's fallen for another person in his class. The second piece is called Dan Carter (still from the video, pictured), a 15-minute project she created based on an answering machine tape she found in a thrift store. Dan Carter is structured around the messages left to Dan by his lover, his social worker, and his neglected children. Kobayashi plays all the characters and lip-syncs their words into the camera; it's an amazing performance. She is a true chameleon and is able to slip in and out of other people's skins effortlessly--men, women, children, young, old, fat, thin, etc. She also does everything by herself--makeup, wardrobe, shooting, editing--incredible stuff and a delight to watch. (Seriously, somebody should swoop this one up and give her her own series.) Kobayashi will be in the house and I will be moderating a conversation with her post-screening. Hope you'll come out to discover the work of these two very talented artists. General admission tickets are $10, $8 for Anthology members, IFP members and students. You can order tickets by clicking here.
On Tuesday, Thom Powers continues his fall season of Stranger Than Fiction at the IFC Center with a documentary called The Dungeon Masters by Keven McAlester, fresh from its world premiere at Toronto. The film tells the stories of three devoted Dungeons & Dragons gamers living in those "nowhere" places in the US, all struggling to translate their rich imaginative worlds into real-life aspirations. McAlester and DP, Lee Daniel (who also shot McAlester's You're Gonna Miss Me), follow them for one year as they traverse the boundaries of their make-believe selves with their "real" lives. The screening starts at 8:00 and McAlester will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A, followed by drinks and more conversation at 99 Below on MacDougal Street. (I'm not sorry that the Big Black Pussycat has bitten the dust as the "after-party" spot for STF, even though it's fun to say "Big Black Pussycat." Huge, distracting TV screens all over, nowhere comfortable to sit en masse and one surly bartender to serve drinks to about a hundred thirsty people--ugh.)
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