Spotlight on Local Film
It’s been a good year for John Helde so far. First he was chosen to be one of 10 “Fly Filmmakers” at the Seattle International Film Festival, and now he’s won the first annual IFP/Seattle Spotlight Award. IFP is the Independent Feature Project, a national organization that now has a chapter in Seattle, and it is a welcome addition to the local filmmaking scene. Like the Northwest Film Forum, it works toward increasing the amount of film production in the city, but IFP/Seattle focuses on nurturing the type of feature film that will get picked up by Lions Gate or Miramax.
Which brings us to the Spotlight Award, which was created to give one lucky filmmaker access to tens of thousands of dollars of production services (film stock, camera rentals, postproduction services, etc.) to make a high-quality short. Helde is that lucky filmmaker, and his project is called Hello. According to the synopsis, it’s about two commuters who have ridden the same ferry for years. One of them decides they should meet, but the other one is a lawyer who has very strict guidelines for that. The resulting negotiation brings forth unresolved issues in each of their lives. I’ll give you updates as the project progresses.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is local filmmaker Jon Behrens. His work will never be confused with calling-card films or other auditions for a Hollywood career. In fact, anybody who caught the Stan Brakhage retrospective at the UW last week will want to check out Behrens’ work. It shares a similar aesthetic with Brakhage’s later work, with hand-painted and otherwise manipulated film optically printed to increase its poetic visual rhythms. Behrens’ latest, Anomalies of the Unconscious, works with the audio rhythms of a Negativland soundtrack, and the experience is quite beautiful. His collection of shorts plays Friday, July 25, at 911 Media Arts Center.
Also on Friday, over at the Rendezvous, a guy by the name of Beeko Bobbywabbanubby (seriously, that’s his given name) will premiere his latest documentary, My Worst Nightmare, for which he interviewed hipsters and homeless people on the streets of Denver and Seattle. Whether you feel the movie is exploitative or not will become irrelevant once he unveils his new series of Hypnotron 2.1 hypnosis videos. Admission is free.
If you thought spoken-word poets and fire dancers were nostalgic remnants of the ’90s, two new movies will either prove they are still part of a vital scene or confirm your suspicions. On Saturday, July 26, a Ballard bar called Segway (5701 22nd Ave NW) will premiere The Northwest Fire Shoot Documentary, which covers dozens of Northwest fire performers. Needless to say, the screening will be accompanied by people throwing fire around. Then on Tuesday, July 29, Richard Hugo House will show Spillin’ My Guts, a documentary about spoken-word performers, and after the screening several of the artists profiled will throw around their own verbal fireballs.