Sound of Silent Film Festival 2008

Coyote, a Shaman Trail Scout, takes a journey which transcends time, weaving from inwood park (where the island was traded for beads & booze), down a long native path (now called 'the great white way', more commonly known as 'Broadway'), to the lower reaches of Manhattan into 'ground zero' (which is now a sacred burial ground for not just the American Indian & the slaves of yesteryear, but for the newest natives of this island empire as well).

Native New Yorker took several years of filming, has a present running time of 13 minutes and is a film by Steve Bilich with an original score composed by William Susman.

Birdcatcher by Chris Hefner

Birdcatcher is a dissection of cinema as an object, a process, and a result that reaches beyond both. Employing both cinematic and proto-cinematic means, as well as sculptural, spatial and performative elements, the picture addresses the movie-making impulse and invites comparisons with other basic human urges, such as fetishism, hunting, and the confused tension between science and things beyond reason.

Shot on Super 8 film, and drawing visual influence from early cinema, the meeting point of outmoded cinematic technology and the attempted invisibility of digital media is an important issue within Birdcatcher as well. The push toward the perfection of representational media through digital means is viewed as simply another gesture against a fundamentally imperfect nature.

In the film, the full arc of the cinematic process is witnessed, from the capturing of the subject (a bird), on through the alchemical processing of raw material, to the final exhibition of the newly re-animated subject. The bird, over the course of the film, is shown to complete its metamorphosis into a film object itself. Its new body is endowed with all the intangible qualities particular to motion pictures, but, like all things, is imperfect and finite.

The Purse Belongs to Her by BJ Moore

Trapped on the “el” one day without an ipod or reading material I was forced to actually look at the people around me and I envisioned a scenario in which a man stops another man from stealing a woman’s purse.

From this simple premise I developed the character of this “hero,” alternately a good guy stopping crime and a quixotic victim of his own grandiose delusions.

BAJALICA by Hurt McDermott

BAJALICA is an attempt to create a film in which the narrative tension derives from its musical structure rather than from the suspense of a story. The music opposes traditional Serbian folk themes to the repetitive textures of American minimalism.

Starting with a shot of a tree in the breeze, static shots of water and trees in a natural setting give way to peacefully moving images of the sky before finally taking a dynamic eye-popping trip on an elevated train through Chicago, the camera lens trained on a stark pyramid-shaped housing project.

The music and speed build excitement, but Chicago feels strangely empty for a city. There are signs of life, but no actual life. Can the Bajalica work its healing magic and bring about a new synthesis? Can the confining forms of the city breathe more naturally? Can the tree and the pyramid become one?

The healing chant of the BAJALICA is an attempt to reach a new synthesis of the two worlds which restores the displaced person to their natural "place" in a new setting.

Elastic Stronghold by Justin Heim

Spaces and situations can be mundane. Boredom makes our experiences feel plastic-like, lifeless and hard. Because of this, we start to feel pain.

Through work and imagination we can create a transformation. We can temporarily experience a comfortable cushion.

We experience a new, colorful existence. Soft and airy, it's not perfect; it's just different…

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