. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

(Very) Short Films By Kevin Everson

Thursday, October 16, 2003, 8pm Kevin Everson in person! The relentlessness of everyday life, as well as its beauty, is the subject of Kevin Everson’s twenty-odd short films made over the past eight years.  Focusing on working-class African-Americans, these brief, intense works are fictional, but mimic documentary in their naturalism and attention to the material […]

Mysterial Power: Recent Video by Lana Lin

Thursday, October 9, 2003, 8:15pm Lana Lin in person! Translations of all types are the subject of video artist Lana Lin’s recent work. No Power to Push Up The Sky (2001) is structured around an interview with Chinese student activist Chai Ling in the turbulent days before the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre; Lin asked fifteen […]

Alma

Thursday, October 2, 2003, 8:15pm Ruth Leitman in person! “Everyone I’m related to is some weird, comical pervert,” observes Margie Thorpe of Atlanta, and the rest of this edgy, intimate documentary bears her out, sometimes hilariously, sometimes with horror.  Take mother Alma for instance – a working class Norma Desmond who spins tall tales out […]

Nema Problema

Thursday, September 25, 2003, 8pm Susana Foxley in person! In conjunction with the Film Center’s “Pinochet and Beyond: Contemporary Chilean Documentary” series, Conversations at the Edge is proud to present this poignant clash-of-cultures study, presented by co-director Susana Foxley.  Nema Problema (the title is Serbian) traces the lives of 26 refugees from the Balkans War […]

Codependence Some More! Contemporary Independent Animation

Thursday, September 18, 2003, 8pm James Duesing, Tender Bodies (2003). Animator and School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Chris Sullivan has put together a collection of recent work by animators from Chicago and beyond, leaning toward neurosis, relationship dynamics and attraction to disaster. Wild animals confess their sins in Jim Trainor’s work-in-progress Harmony, […]

Dead Birds

Thursday, September 11, 2003, 8pm “When I walked away from watching Dead Birds I almost seemed to stagger inside myself.  Today I am still jarred by it and still trying to understand the guilty significance of what it tells us about ourselves.” (Robert Lowell) Highly acclaimed yet rarely screened outside of anthropology circles, Dead Birds […]

Anti-Space Suit: The Dirty Future

Thursday, September 4, 2003, 9:30pm Curators Ben Russell & Sabine Gruffat in person! UFO’s made of cotton fluff.  Cyber-diving rods.  Sad robots.  Cosmic floating beauty aids.  All of this is but a small bit of the detritus that litters our dirty future, a new reality of the always everyday.  Media artists Sabine Gruffat and Ben […]

Myths, Legends and Lies

Thursday, October 24, 2002, 8pm 1925—2002, various directors, USA/Hungary, ca. 105 min, 16mm The mythic imagination runs amok in this program of a dozen animated and live-action films programmed by Jim Trainor, animator and professor of film at the School of the Art Institute.  Includes: Aristophanes on Broadway (1991, Zack Stiglicz), Daumë (2001, Ben Russell), […]

Careful

Thursday, October 17, 2002, 8pm 1992, Guy Maddin, Canada, 100 min, 35mm Guy Maddin in person! Like Edward Gorey’s mysterious books, Guy Maddin’s films are weirdly, unnervingly funny; one senses a deadly parody even if it is not clear exactly what is being made fun of. In Careful, set in some bogus European mountain country, […]

13 Films about Animals

Thursday, December 13, 2001, 6pm 1923-2001, various directors, France/Russia/USA, ca 110 min, various formats From the warm-and-fuzzy to the chilly-and-scaly, from the gently lyrical to the grimly pedagogical, these thirteen films feature dogs, cats, bats and bugs and the people who love them, or don’t. Programmed and presented in person by animation artist/professor Jim Trainor, […]

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