Year 2001 - 439

Short film from a 2002 graduate of the Beijing Film Academy. Showcased at the 2002 edition of the Toronto-based Worldwide Short Film Festival (WSFF).

The Grand Canyon in Arizona is truly one of the world's great natural wonders; it encompasses 2,000 squere miles, reaches a mile down into the earth and spreads ten miles across. Few geological formations evoke such an intense emotional response. This great chasm not only awes our senses, it harbors a multitude of wildlife: mule deer, moutain lions, coyotes, bighorn sheep, wild turkey, blue heron and desert tortoises. The Grand Canyon is also home to the kaibab squirrel, found nowhere else on the planet. More than 2,000 years ago, the Anasazi Indians lived in this region. Our program includes an exclusive segment on Shaman's Gallery, where many Anasazi rock paintings have been preserved. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Grand Canyon a national park in 1908, saying "do nothing to mar its grandeur, keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you." This video is part of a DVD set entitled America's National Park Collection and is DVD 4 out of 6.

An experiment in personal history. The footage was shot in the London docklands, and its trains and bridges prompt a meditation on nationality, identity and language, spoken in German with English subtitles. The speaker's first words, in German, are " I don't speak German".

It's the middle of summer in a cemetery under the blazing sun. In front of a gravestone, the protagonist sends a shout. He keeps shouting "Go, go, go, Akiyama~" until he feels dizzy. What is the reason for this? Is this the grave of the Akiyama family in the first place? ("Remnants")

An experimental dark comedy about an aging prairie poet who tells the fantastical tale about the birth of her muse.

The moment when malice takes shape Three young men and a woman are in a room in a flat. One of the men, Satou, has been shot dead, and the woman is crying, but it does not seem to be out of grief over Satou's death. Suzuki and Yamada are arguing about who should look out the window. They have no idea who has been shooting at this room, for what purpose, or at whom. They don't know what they're up against, where they are, or how many people they have. Did the police shoot at them because they had brought a woman into the room to rape her? If so, how did they find out? It could have been a mistake, but there is no way to be sure, and the reality is that there are dead bodies in front of them, and if they go near the window they could be shot. The leader of the group, Suzuki, is frustrated and Yamada tells him about the feelings he has had for Sato. Suzuki is emboldened by his accusation, but at that moment a second bullet is fired into the room .......

Short film by Lu Chunsheng.

Short film by Liang Yue.

A curious Bosnian refugee becomes an unexpected tour guide through war-torn Sarajevo.

Amidst his dilapidated and obsolete carnival surroundings, a dwarf abandons his life at the sideshow to hang himself. Seeking solace, he is instead confronted by spectres of exploitation and mockery in what proves to be his greatest act yet...

An incantatory exercise of a balancing act on the rocks of an invested place, camera in hand at knee height, uttering by heart in the physical breath, a poem - which became, following his death, a tribute to Louis-René des Forests.

In the three-part series Nine Years Later, Beck revisits video performances he created nearly a decade earlier to music by the British pop band The Smiths. Beck betrays the apparent effortlessness of the original clips by editing them alongside the numerous rehearsals, variously self-conscious and obsessive, they required. With inter-titles and voice-over, Beck recapitulates his performances according to the video technology he used to produce them. As a result, the body, in its correlation with the evolution and obsolescence of technology, is revealed as a purely “enjoying” substance. Whether portraying a vindictive martyr in Bigmouth Strikes Again, a suicidal loner in Panic, or a comatose drag queen in Girlfriend In A Coma, Beck brings the violence and malice implicit in lead-singer Morrissey’s lyrics graphically to life.

"Song Poem (Trips Visits) is a single-channel work I created using videotapes I found in second-hand stores, from home movies to hunting how-to tapes. It was created for a show titled Song Poems, which took as its departure a popular 1960-70s mail-order phenomenon, advertised in the back of magazines, offering to set poems to music in an array of styles and return them as 'singles.' The exhibition brought together musicians and video artists to set original poems by a variety of artists and writers to music and images. I created a video for an original poem by the show’s curator, Steven Hull, with music composed by The Pony Express, an alternative New York rock band." -- Robert Beck

Video remix artist Brian Boyce combines appropriated CNN footage of George W. Bush with clips from The Teletubbies used without permission. This remix was a part of the 2002 Illegal Art Exhibit sponsored by Stay Free! magazine.

A sleazy creep comes out at night to terrorize a small town in California.

People associated with the art world give their personal interpretation of verses taken out of context of the respective poem. We see images, hear sounds, they interpret… What is ‘the city and the world’? What is ‘the room’? What does ‘the jails of time contract’ mean? This piece reveals the feelings prompted by reflection on the simple wording of a poem, which is ultimately reconstructed to propose a discussion around time and where we wasted it.

36 by lotte schreiber and Norbert pfaffenbichler is a strictly mathematical-graphic composition based on the eponymous number.