Wednesday, August 15th - Opening Night

8p ORCHARD VALE (100')  - Tim Kinsella                        
World Premiere  - CUFF presents first feature film from writer/director/musician Tim Kinsella. A dystopian family drama, set in a failed state in an unspecified near future. The film tells the story about five people in the near future living together in the ruins of  contemporary American suburban landscape. The infrastructures of modern convenience have collapsed and the culture has descended into anarchy. 

10p ORCHARD VALE (100')  - Tim Kinsella
(see above)

Thursday, August 16th  

6p  THE GOOD TIMES KID ('77) - Azazel Jacobs            

Chicago Premiere - This film has an exceedingly simple premise: there are two men with the same name, and there's a girl, and there's a promise that has to be fulfilled.   "The GoodTimesKid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so." - Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

745p CELLULOID #1 ('79) - Steve Stasso                                      

Chicago Premiere - Clayton Beaubien is a shell of the brilliant artistic renegade of his youth and desperately tries to regain his auteur credentials with conceptual piece on theory of 'soft celebrity'. "If you are as sick as I am of two-bit Warhol biopics featuring anyone who so much as drove by his studio in the '60s, go see Steve Staso's Celluloid #1...it's Staso's ability to walk the line between exploiting the coolness of celebrity and mocking its emptiness that makes this a gas. For once, Andy would be proud." - S. Palopoli, metroactive.com

930p EACH TIME I KILL (83') - Doris Wishman                           

Chicago Premiere - Awkward, hatchet-faced teenager finds a cheap gold amulet with handy spell-casting instructions. Wearing the necklace allows her to exchange one trait at a time with someone else...once she's murdered her. As the body count quickly rises, her appearance is transformed from dowdy to delectable with the attractive features she plunders from her victims.

Friday, August 17th  

6p - 715p SHORTS
BLISS (4') - Robert Todd
Chicago Premiere - This short video emphasizes the dividing line between our civilized view of 'nature' as serving our aesthetic interests and the danger it poses as an unconquerable power.

JULY FIX (2') - Jason Livingston
Chicago Premiere - "Jason Livingston's film was brief but stunning, with the overall effect being that of a pet dog's POV on acid in a field of beautiful flowers.' - JT Rogstad, TIE Film Festival

TOWER CRANE (8') - Won Tae Seo 
World Premiere - Shots of a tower crane are organized to explore the relationship between illusion of depth in motion pictures and two-dimensional stillness.

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS (12') - Rebecca Meyers
Chicago Premiere - A bustling metropolis' towering skyscrapers and urban architecture reveal traces of the wild. 

ZWISCHEN (2') - Lori Felker
Zwischen exists on the line between opposing forces. There is no grey between black and white, as Zwischen jumps from earth to space, mixes matter with air, and materializes inspiration at the insistence of the hand.  

THIS IS MY LAND (14') - Ben Rivers (United Kingdom)
Chicago Premiere - Jake Williams has lived in Bogancloch for over 25 years, situated within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire. He manages to live off of what he grows in the garden, plus a few things from the nearest village 6 miles away.

THIS IS NOT AN ANCHOR, THIS BOAT IS NOT AN ANCHOR (12') - Marianna Milhorat (Canada)
Chicago premiere - The internal journal through a magical and mysterious landscape, where romanticism is continuously disrupted by an unnatural and anxious treatment of the subject matter and nothing is able to be anticipated.

NATURE MATURE (17') - James Kienitz Williams
Chicago Premiere - Fantasies of the Wild resonate, as if a dream, when a militia of crass look-alikes grow impatient and impotent with nostalgia.

730p THAX (90') - Alex MacKenzie
World Premiere - When Thax was fourteen, a mystical vision told him that he would become a famous poet. By the time his beard went gray, he had performed thousands of times. This film examines the mysterious line that separates the underground from the mainstream, poetry from advertising, fantasy from prophecy, and success from celebrity; a film about the true cost of individuality.

930p VIVA (120') - Anna Biller
Chicago Premiere - Barbi is a sexy suburban housewife in 1972, with a great husband and a lovely home. But despite swinging cocktail parties and her husband Rick's Friday night loving, Barbi feels bored and unfulfilled.  "Biller takes inspiration not just from Z-grade pics of her favorite era, but also from its Playboy magazine aesthetic and TV cologne/liquor commercials. Her production design is a triumph of dedicated thrift-shop acquisition, with decor as much as drop-dead costumes amplifying the cheesiest aspects of early '70s flamboyance." - Variety

Saturday, August 18th   

1p-215p SHORTS
ORBIT (9') - Kerry Laitala
Midwest Premiere - Candy-apple light emissions create a series of stimuli that tickle the retinas a playful pulsation of mis-registered images made when a lab accidentally split the film from 16mm to Regular 8.

FADING STAR (18') - John Standiford
Chicago Premiere - "This meditative film enchants the myths of westward expansion into a single rail car, a dreamer passenger, a clear sky, and a soundtrack that tracks the sounds that go with our history." - NYUFF

!LAS HISTORIAS MAS SEXY DELl MUNDO! #2 / Sexiest Stories in World Pt. 2 (14) - Eric Cheevers
Chicago Premiere - Soft-core porn parody, shot to emulate 70's era 'Swedish Erotica'/stag films WITHOUT resorting to digital filmmaking technology.  Dubbed over in Spanish

Blood of the Earthworm (32') - Brittany Gravely
Midwest Premiere - Blood of the Earthworm is an intentionally anti-climactic barrage of original footage and extractions from horror, science fiction, and educational films, all of which feature contemporary maladies of civilization (ecological devastation, bio-terrorism, consumerism, government conspiracy, etc).

230p OFF THE GRID: LIFE ON THE MESA (64') - Jeremy & Randy Stulberg
25 miles from town, a million miles from mainstream society, a loose-knit community of radicals live in the desert,  struggling as they cling to their unique vision of the American dream. This post-modern wild west is a haven for an uneasy combination of American Veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Gulf War Syndrome and teenage runaways drawn by the sense of anarchy, anonymity and freedom.

4p-545p SHORTS
EARTH'S SHADOW (11') - Huckleberry Lain
World Premiere - The record of a full earth cycle through many different mediums: 3D animation, 8mm home movies and recycled images provided by the Prelinger Archive via archive.org.

WHEN THE LIGHT'S RED (11') - Keith Wilson
World Premiere - A poignant and humorous take on one man's response to intersection panhandling.

WELCOME TO NORMAL (7') - Marianna Ellenberg
Midwest Premiere - You'll get better! An Exquisite Corpse compendium of hypnotic sounds, symptoms, and neurological disorders. Treatment is just around the corner!

PHANTOM CANYON (10') - Stacey Steers
Chicago Premiere - Young woman encounters enormous insects and an alluring man with bat wings in this surreal recollection, of a pivotal journey.

SONIC YOUTH - DO YOU BELIEVE IN RAPTURE? (4') - Braden King
An impressionistic documentary disguised as a music video, film functions as an elegy for CBGB's and every great rock concert you've ever seen.

SURVIVOR COOK, ISLANDS, ABRIDGED (15') - Jenny Stark
World Premiere - A video homage where every 10th frame is double printed reducing the running time from over 2 hours to 10 minutes.   This process is applied to the reality show "Survivor, Cook Islands" which divides "tribes" competing for 1 million dollars by race.   The result is play back of images at such a fast pace that there is little emotional resonance.

STARTLE PATTERN (13') - Eric Patrick
Midwest Premiere - The interior space of a puppet becomes increasingly reflective, revealing the artifice of his own creation.

BLACK & WHITE TRYPPS #3 (12') - Ben Russell
Third in a series dealing with naturally derived psychedelia. Shot during a concert film documents the transformation of a rock audience's collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.

6p CUT (76') - Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon
World Premiere - It is not every documentary about an ancient religious rite that involves the filmmaker talking to their father, medical experts, religious scholars and peculiar activists about penises, but circumcision is not just any ancient religious rite.

7p-745p SHORTS
THE HESHER (4') - Scott Cummings
Chicago Premiere - Hesher's Alone, Hesher's Always Alone.

INTERNET ALPHABET (6') - Joe Nanashe
Midwest Premiere - A systematic guide of internet pornography. Poetry in perversion.

NEW YORK STORY (7') - Nicolas Jenkins
Chicago Premiere - "We'll need to give up any ideas on thee body being sacrosanct if we wish to explore space. Genetic mutation and engineering will be essential for meaningful space travel". - Genesis P-Orridge

LIGHTNING BOLT - VILE HOUSE (4') - Henry Benschoter
Lightning Bolt + toon shack = destruction

THE WILSON STREET CONNECTION (4) - Andrew Hicks
World Premiere - Presentation of a moment on corner of Wilson and Broadway in Chicago.

HASHA ROYKO (4') - Miranda July
"Combines a sense of cheerful expediency (simply outlining what's already there) with a sort of daffy mysticism (pointing out what clearly isn't there) to create a system we can hardly decipher but instructively understand." - Emily Hall, Artforum

ALLA TE ALCANZO / I'LL SEE YOU THERE (6') - Luis Sanchez Ramirez
An economic and linear narrative telling the story of a group of people journeying across the border.

THE DRIFT (8') - Kelly Sears
Chicago Premiere - "A mysterious disappearance on a space journey gone awry launches the counter-cultural revolution at the end of the 1960s.

IT WILL DIE OUT IN THE MIND (4') - Deborah Stratman
A short meditation on the possibility of spiritual existence and the paranormal in our information age.

ENERGIE! (5') - Thorsten Fleisch (Germany)
Technically the TV/video screen comes alive by a controlled beam of electrons in the cathode ray tube; for 'Energie!' an uncontrolled high voltage discharge of 30.000 volts exposes multiple sheets of photographic paper which are then arranged in time to create new visual systems of electron organization.

BYE BYE ONE (5') - Not The Same Color (Austria)
"I have always been fascinated by figures and structures that are printed on the back of your eyes by light," said artist Billy Roisz [(one half of NotTheSameColor, with Dieb13)], "and these images can be seen only when the eyes are shut.

PLAYING ALIVE (16') - Mike Olenick
World Premiere - An existential meditation on the career and persona of John Travolta.

8p HELL ON WHEELS (90') - Bon Ray
Midwest Premiere - A from-the-trenches look at dizzying clash of athleticism, exhibitionism, egos, politics and business that's modern-era roller derby. Texas women overcome myriad obstacles in resurrecting and revamping the sport, only to find internal strife ripping the fledgling organization apart. Two leagues emerge from the clash, and what follows ignites an international roller derby revival.

10p GO GO MOTEL (73') - Dan Bell
World Premiere - A surreal journey into the dark and foreboding world of strippers, hookers, bums, boozers, and skid-row criminals.

Sunday, August 19th   

1p-230p SHORTS
INTERPLAY (6) - Robert Todd
A film made in summer: A play in 3 acts, a dance in 3 forms, 3 versions of paradise

930 (10') - Alexandre Larose
Chicago Premiere - Passages from darkness to light intercut with moments of hesitation in this attempt to overcome fear and to transform its emotional residues into positive energy.

DIE ENTNAZIFIZIERUNG DES MH / THE DE-NAZIFICATION OF MH (18') - James T. Hong (German)
Experimental, philosophical documentary exploring the denazification proceedings of renowned but infamous German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Shot entirely in or near the Black Forest in Germany

THE MAGICIAN'S HOUSE (6') - Deborah Stratman
Chicago Premiere - Sometimes the supernatural lingers plainly in the most ordinary places, secret only in as much as its trace goes unnoticed. Both a letter to an alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid.

ELIZABETH SHORT (7') - Deco Dawson
Using archival footage, newsprint images, text and an innovative use of audio, film is a sensitive yet harrowing collage account of the 1947 Black Dahlia murder.

MAGNAVOZ (26') - Jesse Lerner (Mexico)
An adaptation of Xavier Icaza's speculative rant on Mexico's future. Using noisy broadcasts from atop the volcanoes, raucous bacchanalia at popular watering holes and a series of apocalyptic, hyper-nationalistic pronouncements, the meditation is timely and prescient, though it was written more than eighty years ago.

245p RANDOM LUNACY: VIDEOS FROM THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED (60') - V Zimet & S Silber
Chicago Premiere - Mainstream America might regard the family group of buskers who called themselves 'The Flying Neutrinos' as homeless. But they thought of themselves as "sans domicile fixe" - homeless by CHOICE.
"Movies like to pretend they're different, but Random Lunacy really, truly is. The gifted filmmakers Victor Zimet and Stephanie Silber have grabbed themselves a subject who can wiggle off any hook, so they avoid glib judgements and do the smart thing by wiggling right along with him. It turns out to be the only way to tell this questing, quicksilver story. Prepare to be wowed." --Peter Travers/Rolling Stone

4p NO MANS LANGUAGE (45') - Dana Levy (Israel)
Chicago Premiere - The film follows Ron Israel, a 76-year-old holocaust survivor who doesn't stop wandering. Between places, wives, genders, languages. For the past 40 years he has been developing a language called Yartima, which he hopes will one day become the international language of the world. Currently he is the only speaker.

5p-630p GALAXIAN (90') - Curated by Rebbeca Myers
A popular arcade game of the early 1980s, Galaxian connoted the luminous vastness of outerspace as well as the accompanying danger of alien worlds.  Each film and video in this program embraces the mediated otherness of video game source material to create ominous realms fraught with human frailty, death, and anxiety, charged by questions of identity, spirituality, and the struggle to make sense of it all. 

REHERSALS FOR RETIREMENT (11') - Phil Solomon
Third in the " The San Andreas Trilogy, dedicated to the memory of Mark Lapore

UNTITLED for David Gatten (5') - Phil Solomon & Mark LaPore
Mark and I made this film for our friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a "get well soon" card... for all three of us. It was made on the last night that I saw Mark, my best friend of 32 years. 

AND WE ALL SHINE ON (7') - Michael Robinson
An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, its signals spreading myth and deception along its murky path. Conjuring a vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise, this unworldly broadcast reveals its hidden demons via layered landscapes and karaoke, singing the dangers of mediated spirituality.

SHE PUPPET (17') - Peggy Ahwesh
In a work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider, Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone. 

UNTITLED #2 (13') - Valerie Brewer
Exploits a glitch in the visual landscape of an online community to tease out the vague boundaries and tenuous relationships of virtual identity, property, and body.

STRANGER COMES TO TOWN (28') - Jacqueline Goss
Combines re-worked animation from the Department of Homeland Security with impressions from the on-line game World of Warcraft, journeys via Google Earth, and stories from the border to tell a tale of bodies moving through lands familiar and strange.

HYMN OF RECKONING (6') - Kent Lambert
There's a place for us somewhere a place for us.

TOTAL POWER - DEAD DEAD DEAD (3') - Stephanie Barber
A haiku or love letter to the charm of two-dimensional images. The spectacle awaits our adoration, gives a tender intimation of collusion.

645p DISARM (9') - Jack Hammond
World Premiere - A car jacker learns a gun is no match for a Jetta going 80mph down the highway in this fast paced urban noir featuring insane stunts (including a backwards trip through a toll booth) performed in actual traffic.

7p THE EARL (70') - Jim Sikora
Preview Screening - Much of the film's enjoyment derives from Neveu's dense, cryptic unfolding storyline, so reluctant to give much away synopsis- wise. Suffice to say that the plot revolves around a trio of twenty-something siblings who meet on an annual basis to engage in a live-action role-playing game - an apparent combo of freeze tag and GLADIATOR-for-the-playground. Amidst the bashing and smashing, there are "rules" that seem to flow as freely as the participants' head wounds.

8p LA TRINCHERA LUMINOSA DEL PRESIDENTE GONZALO (60') - Jim Finn
Chicago Premiere - When members of the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group the Shining Path were captured and imprisoned, the authorities kept them in their own cellblocks, which they ran as guerrilla training camps. The Shining Path prisoners called their cellblocks ,"shining trenches of combat." The prisoners organized propaganda, literature, and military classes as well as marches, criticism sessions, and dances.