Dicky Bahto

silent, 10m, digital

Short film by Dicky Bahto

Combines home movie footage of his father with visual variations based on the game backgammon. Commissioned by the television station Canal180 in Portugal with a composition scored for it by Matmos, or shown silently.

Daily afternoon ritual. Made with the help of my partner, Patrick Londen, and featuring Katoosh.

sound, 13.5 minutes, Super 8mm

"What's a Life?" is a project that developed over the course of a few years incorporating material recorded on Super 8 film, cell phone video, and audio recordings. The recordings are a mix of portraits of musicians as well as diary material focused on sound and music. While the project was "alive" and I was still accumulating new material, I would present it as a multimedia installation or as expanded cinema performances involving multiple television screens, video and Super 8 projection, cassette tapes, and mp3 audio playback, editing the material anew for each presentation and incorporating varying amounts of chance and site-specificity into each version. After a few years of letting the work live, breath, and grow, I decided to stop it's life in this form, and have since edited an hour and a half long single channel video work, some sections of which (the one you are seeing now for instance) may be shown independently.

CHATTY CATTIES is a black comedy set in an alternate reality where cats can communicate with people. At the center of the film are Shelby, a Holly Godarkly type, and her cat, Leonard. When Shelby begins dating a friendly musician named Nate, Leonard starts to see a light at the end of the tunnel. At its heart the film is about communication and agency. In order to highlight this theme the cats are voiced by Deaf/HoH actors. We aim to address issues facing the Deaf community and other under-represented groups in a subtle way, and to give Deaf actors opportunities to play the kinds of roles that they are not normally offered, roles in which their hearing loss is not part of the plot.