The Stranger

Steve Kurtz has his own personal 9/11: 5/11/2004, when his wife Hope died of heart failure. FBI agents subsequently found in his house harmless bacteria he was using for an artwork in a museum show, and the government began to stalk him as a bioterrorist. The bioterrorism charge had no legs, but the government has continued its attack on Kurtz, whose work is critical of the government's lack of regulation on the big business of genetically modified foods. (Kurtz is awaiting trial on mail fraud, which could carry a sentence of 20 years in prison.) Artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson's forays into identity get heavy-handed (when Tilda Swinton, for instance, remarks ponderously on the implications of the death of Hope, who she has just played in earlier scenes), but they're a side show anyway to the main event: a portrait of what happens when your own paranoid government gets into your house. By Jen Graves