Special Balagan Program
February 23rd, Friday, 7:30,
Revolving Museum, 288-300 A Str., Boston, tel: (617) 439-8617, $10

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Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva, local filmmakers and curators of Balagan, are pleased to once again be part of the 3rd annual Boston Underground Film Festival. This year it's our pleasure to offer you a taste of Balagan. The Balagan Experimental Film/Video Series began in September 2000, as a regularly scheduled Thursday night series featuring local and international experimental films, videos and performance art. The Balagan series continues to run a diverse range of experimental programming throughout the year at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline.

Balagan in the BUFF 2001 represents a sampling from last seasons amazing works that were presented among 8 experimental programs that included: Local Masters, Portuguese experimentalists, Local Animations and Yugoslavian Underground videos to name just a few. We hope you enjoy the Balagan Experimental program and if you do, please come visit us on Thursday nights at 8PM at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.


Program:

Lost and Found animation 10min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Jeff Sias


Lost and Found
is an experimental puppet animation, which uses found object constructions as props and characters. The film follows a timid boy as he is tempted with the loss of innocence and is drawn into a small, but symbolic journey through a world of lost hope and faded memories.


Jeff Sias
is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design where he majored in Film, Video and Animation. While there he made several live-action/ special effects films and then moved into animation and sculpture. Combining puppets, animation and sculptural elements, Jeff finished his senior degree project Lost and Found in 1996. Jeff is currently directing and animating for a commercial animation studio in Boston where he works on spots for television and film. He spends his off-time working with marionette artist Dan Butterworth and maintaining a studio in Waltham where he produces sculpture and photography. With other members of his studio Jeff has several films and puppet performances in the works for completion in the near future.
Fissures 2.5min, 16mm, 1999
Director: Louise Bourque

A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave. In making this piece, I literally manipulated and distorted the film plane through experimentation in doing my own contact printing of personal home movie images. The point of contact is continuously shifted so that the film plane appears warped and the images fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like resurfacing memories. The footage was hand-processed and solorized as well as colored by hand through toning before a final print was made at the lab. Louise Bourque is a Canadian experimental filmmaker living in the Boston area where she is currently teaching cinema at Emerson College and has been Visiting Film Faculty at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts since 1996. Her films have been widely presented in festivals worldwide and she has received numerous grants, honors and awards for her work.
La Big Fiesta animation 8min, 16mm, 1999
Director:
Max Coniglio

La Big Fiesta is a hand drawn animation. A slice of Neopolitan life through the eyes of an Italian American. Max Coniglio is a native from Naples, Italy and has been drawing cartoons as early as he can remember. Max works from memory and has used animation as a tool for capturing those memories and recreating them the way he remembers them.

Don't ask, Don't Tell 7min, video 2000
Director:
James Nadeau

This film uses Naval training footage to critique the American Militaries policy on the presence of Homosexuals within its ranks. Through a juxtaposition of the training footage with the audio of the Senate hearings, one can see the failings of the Military's rhetoric. The film is also presented as a part of the live performance whithin which two versions of it are projected both on screen and the artist. The perfomance aspect brings to the front (literally) personal iissue of the artist who, as a child raised in this environment, exists at once in both the Queer world and the Military world. James Nadeau is a BFA candidate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University. Working mainly in the field of Video, his work has most recently been screened at the Provincetown International Film Festival and the Amigo Racism show at the Gallery De La Raza, San Francisco.

Minotaur animation 8min, 16mm, 1999
Director:
Dan Sousa

Minotaur is a loose interpretation of the traditional Greek myth as seen through the beast's point of view. Abandoned on a cavernous island our childlike minotaur has as his only friend a mischievous red ball which leads him into the depths of the maze. Dan Sousa studied animation, painting and illustration at RISD where he produced his first two films. After a brief period of freelancing and teaching at the School of the Museum of fine Arts in Boston, he took a position at Olive Jar Studios where he has directed several commercial shorts. Currently, Daniel is collaborating on a variety of multimedia projects and has started pre-production on his next animated film.

Fuzzy Logic 4min, video, 1995
Director:
John Scott

A video made without a camera. John Scott is a film/video maker from Canada. He is currently teaching at Emerson College. His works have been screened at festivals around US and Canada including Black Maria, DoubleTake Documentary Festival, The Midwest Film and Video Fest at Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis.

Chameleon animation 2,5min, video, 2000
Director:
Zelimir Zarkovic.

Animation about different approaches to the heart of a female.

Ode to New York 1,5min, video, 2000
Director:
Milos Gojkovic

A Serbiam in New York.


I WANNA BE A PRESIDENT OF SERBIA
3min, video, 1999
Director:
Milan Rasic

A young man takes to the streets of Serbia in a humorous attempt to win the presidency while making a witty commentary on Serbian politics and the current state of the country.

In the Fall of 2000 Balagan was fortunate to present a program curated by LOW-FI VIDEO (Belgrade, Yugoslavia). LOW-FI VIDEO is a project with no expiry date, its mission being the advancement of the aesthetics of non-pretencious cinema and the subversion of elitism on film. The project considers video-technology boom a very useful ally in the struggle for the above mentioned goals. LOW-FI VIDEO is based in Serbia. Owing to the current situation in the country, the project now works under very difficult conditions, but the faith in its cinematic mission still keeps the project participants active.

Silence 13min, 16mm, 2001
Director:
Vanessa O'Neill

An idea of white. Vanessa O'Neill's films have screened at film festivals and many venues in the Boston Area. She is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and is the Associate Director of the Boston Jewish Film Festival.

Final Exit 5min, pixel vision video, 2000
Director:
Joe Gibbons

Final Exit an aged one is confronted with his options in blunt terms. Does he want to drag out his existence, increasingly infirm and a burden to his caretakers, or go quietly, before resentment overcomes sentiment? Does he wish to go on living with the quality of his life increasingly diminished, or euthanized? Would he prefer cremation or burial? This tape confronts the issues of mortality and advancing decrepitude facing even the friskiest of us. Joe Gibbons works in film and video, making features and shorts. His work has been shown at numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and included twice in the Whitney Biennial, and is regularly included in the NY Video Festival and the Rotterdam Film Festival. His last feature The Genius, starring Karen Finley and himself, had a month-long run in NYC at Anthology Film Archives and was included in such festivals as New Directors/New Films, AFI and Rotterdam. He lives in New York and Boston and teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Surface 9min, s8/video, 2000
Director:
Alla Kovgan, Alissa Cardone

Surface was inspired by "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank. The quality of images and shifting sound divide the inside and the outside. It is a journey of spirit through the struggle between forces of isolation and connection, oppression and release, the hidden and the revealed.
Alla Kovgan is a film and video maker from Moscow (Russia) who has live and worked in Boston since 1996. Her 16 mm films have been screened at the film festivals around
the US, Canada, and Europe including Boston Underground Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival (Victoria, BC), East Art Gallery (Hungary), EuroUnderground (Poland), Dance on Camera (US), Napolidanza (Italy). Alla's mediums of expression and exploration encompass short films, multimedia performances, interactive video projections and other image/sound/body installations in collaboration with dancers and musicians. Alissa Cardone loves to sing, dance, play guitar and make things. She has danced with choreographers Nicola Hawkins, Anna Myer, and currently Marjorie Morgan, Christine Bennett and Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works, whom with she has toured internationally. Alissa collaborates with different musicians, film makers, dancers and other artists to manifest interactive performances of various kinds through the Outside Art Collective that she co-founded in 1999. She's performed in France and Russia as well as in the subway, the Boston Public Gardens, and in the street in Harvard Square. Her work has been influenced by the study with Min Tanaka on Body Weather Farm, Japan.

In the Fall of 2000 Balagan was fortunate to present a program curated by Manuel Henriques from Galeria Ze Dos Bois (Lisbon, Portugal).

ZDB is a creation, programming, confrontational and experimental structure run by a group of people. Born in 1994, ZDB has affirmed itself as a privileged space for confrontation, experimentation and promotion of emerging proposals that deal with contemporary aesthetics and technologies. ZDB has made a place for itself as a promoter of a series of different activities that have in common the assertion of emerging art in face of institutionalised proposals. As a creation, production and promotion structure of emerging art,
ZDB presents its own projects, and at the same time functions as a space of programming, producing and confrontation of proposals that are a long way away of institutional circuits. Two sets of work represent this show - Paulo Abreu and Dub Connections


Four 1 minute animations (S8, 1999/2000) by Paulo Abreu

  • Ball
  • The Gibles
  • Freak Scene
  • Fatima Trance


Ball


The Gibles

 

DUB VIDEO CONNECTION 5min, video, 1999/ 2000
Director: Dub Video Connection (Rui Valerio + Joao Carrilho)

The DUB VIDEO CONNECTION exists since 1997. This project was originally founded by Joao Carrilho, Rui Toscano and Rui Valerio and is currently composed of Joao Carrilho and Rui Valerio. This project explores the possibilities of video as live act show. The types of exhibits range from installations and isolated projections of audio visual themes, to the interaction with various other artists and disciplines from the world of show. The most used exhibit model is Video Jam. Images created by DUB VIDEO CONNECTION (sometimes with sound) are mixed and projected live as a visual support to the performance of DJs creating a dance floor multimedia show.