Getting Creative With Constraints

This year marks the fifth 10 Under 10 program, an annual documentary shorts compilation organized by Ellen Spiro, University of Texas professor, filmmaker (Body of War, Troop 1500), and self-professed celebrant of the "small and cheap." Ten films under 10 minutes long and made for less than $10. ("Not that we audit anyone's books," she adds. "It's really just about the spirit of low budget.")

Rather than producing this year's entire show herself, Spiro recruited students Sarah Garrahan, Lauren Sanders, and Keith Wilson as coordinating and supervising producers, and she invited Austin Film Society staffers Chale Nafus, Bryan Poyser, and Agnes Varnum to select the films. Here's a brief overview of this year's program, of which eight films were produced by Master of Fine Arts students:

"Great Grandmama for Obama" (D: Micah Barber) follows the presidential election through the eyes of an 88-year-old black delegate to the Democratic National Convention, a woman who has experienced Jim Crow and the civil rights movement and finally lives to see the election of the first black president. Angela Torres Camarena's "Exiled in America" is a portrait of a family torn apart when the mother is deported to Mexico. "Squeezed Out of Business" (D: Chithra Jeyaram) follows the travails of Austin's own Good Flow Juice Co. when the operation was shut down by the Food and Drug Administration and forced to start pasteurizing its juices.

Radio-Television-Film undergrad Gideon De Villiers takes a ride on the experimental side in his short, "Different Spokes," which blends documentary with narrative in an exploration of the inner life of a BMX rider who has an accident and struggles to recover. In "Nine.5," Keith Wilson pursues his own fascination with older image-making technologies by taking a closer look at today's move toward HD above all else and questioning the commonly held assumption that a sharper image automatically means a better film.

Russell Bush and Allen Ho's "Locomotion" takes a seemingly simple idea – the observation of people running to get somewhere – and raises it to another level in what turns out to be an ethnographic look at "running" in the 21st century. Ruth Fertig took on her own cockroach phobia in (what else?) "The Cockroach Project" in an attempt to deal with her own aversion to the critters and to learn how others dealt with theirs. Then, too, she discovers that there are also roach "enthusiasts." The legal psychedelic drug Salvia divinorum is the subject of undergrad Alfredo Lopez's doc, "Barely Legal," while Todd Thompson turns his lens on the quirky owner and guitar-fixer par excellence of Austin's Musical Exchange in "A Lifetime in Repair." Finally, there's Ben Slamka and Tomasz Werner's "Vitula Arcus," a Super-8 short about the craft of violin and bow-making.

Spiro – whose pedagogical mantra for how to make a better doc is "decapitate the talking head, your job is to find a better way" – is mightily pleased with this year's crop of RTF student films: "I can say with confidence that you will not find a more passionate group of films in a program under two hours anywhere else."  

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AFS Documentary Tour presents 10 Under 10 on May 13, 7-9pm, at the Alamo Ritz. Tickets are $4 for AFS members and $6 for the general public. For more info, call 322-0145 or visit www.austinfilm.org.