The last three days of a five-day festival, now in its eighth year, that highlights film and video shorts and features by women, including documentary, animated, narrative, and experimental works. It continues Friday, March 10, through Sunday, March 12, at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont. Films and videos are grouped under such program headings as “Live in a Glass House,” “Play With Fire,” and “Take One’s Life in One’s Hands.” Festival tickets are $5 per program for the general public, $4 for members of Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago Filmmakers, and the Center for New Television, students, and senior citizens. For further information call 281-4988.
PLAY WITH FIRE Seven films and videos, all made over the past couple of years: Margaret Hussey’s film Two Eggs Any Style (“a narrative without a story line”); Alison Morse’s pixilated animation The Romance of Reorganization; Cynthia Cohn’s documentary film Lovestruck; Susan Emshwiller’s black comedy Breakfast Messages; Megan M. Sinciair’s one-minute tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, Norman; Maggie Sherman’s video The Gift; and Camille Billops’s experimental narrative-documentary video, Older Women and Love. (9:00)
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DEFY DANGER Four recent videos: Marianne Connor’s personal travel journal through Jordan and the West Bank, Impressions of Jordan; Margot Starr Kernan’s experimental and autobiographical narrative Watching; Carol Yourman’s Building Peace in the Midst of War, which focuses on the sister-city relationship between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the repopulated village of San Jose las Flores, El Salvador; and Jenny Morgan’s Angola Is Our Country, in which Angolan women describe their experience of South Africa’s 12-year undeclared war against their own country. (9:00)
CAST YOUR FATE TO THE WIND Two short documentary features on film, both completed last year: Diane Kitchen’s Before We Knew Nothing, about the life of the Ashaninka Indians in the jungles of Peru, and Kelly Holland’s Viva la Paz, about 300 people from around the world who traveled to Central America in support of peaceful dialogue and nonmilitary alternatives. (1:30)
HANG BY A THREAD Seven videos and four films. The videos are Abby Luby’s 1988 Paper Dance, featuring interactions between a dancer and a wall of paper; Diane Teramana’s 1988 Stress Test, about a mother enduring migraine and noisy kids; Annette Barbier’s 1987 My Country ‘Tis of Thee, which features a series of transmutations of the title melody over footage of a deteriorating landscape; Cecilia Condit’s striking “mini-opera” Not a Jealous Bone (1987); Meg Amato’s 1988 Breaking Out of the Reptilian Brain, “a portrait of a state of mind”; Margot Starr Kernan’s 1988 Breaking and Entering, set in California during the cold war; and Steina’s experimental Lilith (1987). The films are Marcy Hedy Lynn’s 1987 expressionistic fairy tale, Whether Willed; Ines Sommer’s very striking and original experimental work, A Still Life of Postcards (1988); Melanie Magisos’s examination of the use of women’s bodies in artworks, Streets of the Dream (1986); and Sharon Sandusky’s experimental 1987 Richtung. (10:00)
GO TO SEA IN A SIEVE Three films, all of them made last year. Martina Attille’s Dreaming Rivers, made in England, is a “dream drama” about migration. Lise Yasui’s Family Gathering takes a personal look at the incarceration of the Japanese in U.S. concentration camps in 1941 through the experiences of her own family. Midi Onodera’s Canadian Displaced View offers another examination of Japanese identity and history, this time in a Canadian context. (2:00)
VEER OFF THE BEATEN PATH An all-video program in three parts. The first part is a collection of videotapes curated by the late Lyn Blumenthal, Variety Is the Spice of Life, which includes Jill Kroesen’s Lowell Moves to New York (1983), Valie Export’s A Perfect Pair (1986), Linda Look’s Luchare (1986), Blumenthal’s own Double Cross (1985), Max Almy’s Modern Love (1979), and Laurel Chiten’s Two in Twenty (1987). Part two is Suzie Silver’s eight-minute treatment of a lesbian relation, You Know Something (1984), and part three is Julie Zando’s strange and disquieting look at power relationships between women, Let’s Play Prisoners (1988). (8:00)
