Dallas VideoFest 2009

Making art after the end of illusionism led 14 artists in the 1970’s including Laurie Andersen, Alice Aycock, and Chuck Close to create performances, sculptures, earthworks, tableaux, furniture, shaped canvases, and more using unusual materials. They explore the process of making forms and giving meanings to those forms. In this idea art, their focus is as often social and psychological as artistic. Bart worked on this film in his New York days and was there for an amazing Laurie Andersen performance.

When Stacey Ross unexpectedly died in 2007, her friends contacted filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt to complete a project she had only just begun. The result is “Four Questions For A Rabbi”, a film that touches upon issues of identity, persecution and mortality.

Sometimes success and failure are the same thing. Especially with independent bands. Tour schedules, unemployment, day care, divorce, drinking... it's the 23 hours you're not on stage that's the hard part. Shot on one stage, in one club, during four days, this documentary empowers every almost-made-it musician to speak with a single, honest, infuriating, anonymous, resonant voice. And it's funny. And they kill live.

It was a subprime mortgage gamble and the working-class were unwitting chips on the table. This debut feature gets to the guts of the matter by explaining how $8 trillion vanished into the American Casino. We hear from a teacher, a banker who sold us out, a mortgage salesman who inflated incomes to justify loans, and a billionaire who won a $500 million bet that people would lose their homes. We see the casino's endgame: Riverside, California, a foreclosure wasteland of rats and meth labs, where mosquitoes breed in stagnant swimming pools of yesterday's dreams.

Short films screening in this program include: Set Set Spike, I am so proud of you, Lezzieflick, Missed Aches

An unflinching valentine to Condit’s mother in her last years, Annie Lloyd begins with wildflowers swaying dreamily. Ghostly laughter surrounds, with a faint echo of wind chimes. There’s a magical quality to this evocation of the wind—of forces we look at but cannot see. Condit tells us in an intimate and unsettling voiceover “My mother collects leaves. I collect stories. Mother’s stories.”

"...a cross between Dada, David Letterman, John Cage and the Smothers Brothers." - The New York Times