The View From Here

Françoise has just been dumped by her husband for a much younger woman. In order to cheer her up, and to celebrate her 60th birthday, sisters Rose and Alice decide to take their mother to a resort on the tropical island of Reunion so they can relax, work on their tans, and have too many margaritas. But when Rose pays a one-night stand, Thierry, to show her mother a good time, their holiday plans start to unravel.

In 1993, Alex shoots an interview with her best friend Jim as he tries to recount his life as he is dying. In 2004, she re-works this haunted video, playing it in real-time but letting bleed in a host of present day interviewees who also reflect upon AIDS, death, activism, and video. What remains is this woman's contemplative, loving memorial to one gay man lost to AIDS that also marks what changes and lasts after death, across time, and because of videotape.

Two lost souls visiting Tokyo - the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial - find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.

The strange comedy film of two close brothers; one, Wilbur, who wants to kill himself, and the other, Harbour, who tries to prevent this. When their father dies leaving them his bookstore they meet a woman who makes their lives a bit better yet with a bit more trouble as well.

A young transgender man explores his gender identity and searches for love in rural Nebraska.

Mapping a Seattle landscape as the season turns, this film is an optical print of original handmade frames. Featuring hydrangea, geranium, nandina, camillia, oregano, vinca, snapdragon, cyclamen, violet, linden, clematis, linaria, birch bark and daphne. Music by Bay Area composer, arranger, and jazz bassist Chuck Metcalf used with permission.

A recycled film that addresses our culture of waste. According to a Cornell University research report, eleven thousand tons of trash a day are discarded in New York City, and 15 to 40% is food scraps that could be composted. In COMPOST CONFIDENTIAL, handmade botanicollage film frames, saved from unrealized projects, were put in a compost bin, left for several weeks, then retrieved and optically-printed. In the printing process, the sprocket holes themselves, usually outside of the frame, were intentionally revealed as an element inside the frame. The soundtrack, recycled from an audio project, features interviews with urban composters at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City.

For those who find listing and repetition romantic. A near perfect structure. Three acts, an auditory red herring and classic love story.

THEY INVENTED MACHINES is about colonialism, entertainment and love. The images are taken mostly on Disney World rides where one is shown facsimiles of people from far away lands. The soundtrack, a little more than half-way through, ceases its cricketing and, against impressionistic waterfalls, mentions love ("they have love here") which must then be thought of in the context of this same wonder, possession and amusement. The film ends with a series of flights.

While referencing the explorer Christopher Columbus, the film is actually a gift for filmmaker Stephanie Barber's friend, the performance artist Theresa Columbus. The short imagistic film is suggesting (or questioning) ever so gently the effects (both positive and negative) that exploring has on that which is being explored. Our most well known Columbus, now so often vilified, here stands in for a more psychological and artistic exploration and the fall out that can occur from that sort of expansionism as well. Like many of Barber's films, the piece itself works almost separately from the implications and sidelong glances of the title and the way it interacts with the (almost passive) images and (often quite dominant) soundtrack.

According to filmmaker Stephanie Barber, "This is probably the most heartbreaking film I have made." The pacing is romantic and simple, haiku-esque pauses and inclusions, with the words contrasting this poetry with their factual, disinterested narration. And that narration is a simple statement of failure; one which lies not in any action but in the pre-thought to that action, the hope or faith one holds in oneself, one's knowledge or abilities.