A woman with an oddly hairy belly gives birth to a pair of hands in Marie Losier’s giddily inventive "portrait" of filmmaker Guy Maddin, done as a collaboration between the two iconoclasts. A longtime fan of Maddin, Losier (best known for other inventive portraits of underground film icons like Tony Conrad and George Kuchar) hoped to document him as well; "I hate my voice and face," Maddin replied, and sent her Super-8 footage of his hands instead. Losier interwove the footage into her own distinct tale, shot like a surrealist 1920s silent film. A must for fans of Losier, Maddin and ingenious cinema in general, MANUELLE LABOR was completed for the Berlin Film Festival (where Maddin was the guest of honor). - Jason Sanders A collaboration film by Marie Losier and Guy Maddin. Two sisters, five brothers, a doctor and two nurses and the miraculous birth of a pair of hands, but whose hands?
"The theater is about sex." At least according to Richard Foreman, the father of the Ontological Hysterical Theater. THE ONTOLOGICAL COWBOY documents Foreman’s invocation of the "manifest destiny" of the avant-garde theater, King Cowboy Rufus strolling down off San Juan Hill with a sigh, waving his handkerchief. Foreman plays himself, and the cast pantomimes his preoccupations. If "the cast and crew suffer alike," it’s all for a good cause: the violent rebirth of the American theater, with Foreman as its midwife.
Rita
A comic drama about a time in the near future when citizens are happy to be property traded on the stock exchange.
In 1992, Reza Abdoh wrote and directed a movie called The Blind Owl. It uses many of the actors who have come to constitute the Dar A Luz company, including Tony Torn, Tom Fitzpatrick, Juliana Francis, and Tom Pearl. It will disappoint those who approach it looking for a film analogue of the “faster and louder” aesthetic that critics have used to characterize much of Abdoh’s stage work. The Blind Owl does use a variety of techniques reminiscent of his stage direction, giving it an unusual theatricality.
