Film Feast

The cascade of events beginning with the September 11 horror shaped the theme of Cinemaker Co-op's December festival of Super-8 films. Initially, they wanted to give filmmakers the opportunity to respond to September 11 and other world events. "Film has always been such a powerful forum for those kinds of responses and for filmmakers to discuss with one another political reactions," explains Cinemaker board member Jen Proctor. And Cinemaker, which presents a Super-8 film festival every three months, is uniquely situated to provide a venue for such rapid response by film artists.

But as the staff and board continued discussing the upcoming festival, they decided to broaden the theme to include anything on people's minds in these times. Cinemaker Managing Director Jodie Keeling says they agreed to "create a forum so that people could address September 11, if they felt compelled to, or to make something completely personal or completely unrelated to the [events]." Thus arose the idea of a "Potluck" festival, a mix of film, discussion, and food, the latter provided by the Cinemaker staff and board. "Eating is one of the great ways to bring people together," says Proctor. "Food is magical in creating unity."

As with their previous festivals, Cinemaker required that all the films submitted for "Potluck" be shot on Super-8 celluloid with original soundtracks and a running length of no more than four minutes, with a maximum of four splices. With some of the 15 submissions by Cinemaker stalwarts and others by beginning filmmakers, the program promises a healthy mix of talent and viewpoints.

In Hung Nguyen's "Six Blind Kids Playing Goal Ball," youngsters rely on sound to play a ballgame, thereby reaffirming joy and pleasure hurled into the face of adversity and uncertainty. Shannon Owens and Andre Silva take the idea of potluck to its furthest cinematic extent in their jointly created "Peaceful Light." They used snippets of old film that had been edited out of four previous films -- "leftovers, so to speak" -- and then edited the bits and pieces together. Bleaching and painting the images, they cooked up a hand-manipulated "cinematic goulash." For Scott Nyerges' submission, he decided to edit some of the footage he shot last summer in New York ("an amazingly photogenic town, which looks especially good in black and white"), creating a Super-8 sketchbook of the city.

Justin Hennard perhaps best captures the eclectic nature of the festival with his two submissions, which range from the political to the personal. "Our Jihad Will Be a Good Jihad" depicts snails continually racing across a photograph of a face laced with Arabic script. A male voice reveals "I'm afraid of everything." As the same phrase is repeated and sampled endlessly in complex overlays and echoes, a hypnotizing rhythm is established. It is a haunting film redolent of a poem by Rumi or a Sufi mantra that drains fear of its power.

Hennard's second film, "Snow Storm in Iowa," portrays an elderly woman talking about wills, estate trustees, unreliable lawyers, and memories of the family farm now in litigation, while images of the snow-covered farm appear. The film explores death, cold winters, money, inheritance, and dishonesty -- themes known to America long before terrorism came home.