Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

Picking up on the larger conflict that exists between two worlds whenever popular entertainment tries to synthesize with underground culture, Thrashed reclaims old BMX and skateboarding footage, confusing it through a psychedelic lens in an attempt to distill some of the original spirit.

Snake Skin depicts a struggle to the end between a roadrunner and its masculine nemesis, the rattlesnake.

These five intentionally amateur quality video works take on the appearance of public access television or online “viral” videos as a means of exploring and deconstructing the current cultural obsession with online amateur video.

Dipping between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, this movie journeys to a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a belief system. An exhausted and expectant crowd waits on this narrow span. It is not a wide stretch, but it can last forever.

A skewed take on film detritus: 35mm movie trailers rescued from the trash and affected by hand and digitally, holding up a funhouse mirror to the industry of expectations.

For the mathematician’s part, information was a series of signals, marginalized in its presence and lamented in its absence. Through these sounds and images we are left to excavate a site comprised of Claude Shannon’s own allusions: emotive schematics, a multitude of voices, our digital ruptures, and a quiet love story.

A Busby Berkley water ballet turns into geometrical abstraction.

A litter of kittens ignites a fierce sensuality in three little girls. This is the end of innocence.

Return of the Black Tower was conceived as a "response" film to John Smith's 1987 classic short experimental film, The Black Tower.
"Barmy, baffling and weirdly funny,... an elliptical, satirical examination of contemporary belief, as much as it is about the problem of art as an incommensurate, incommunicable experience." - JJ Charlesworth, Time Out London

An experimental adaptation or fragmentation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s unrealized script, Technically Sweet, that he wrote in the late '60s, but never produced. Set in The Amazon and Sardinia, it was to star Jack Nicholson as T., a disillusioned journalist obsessed with guns, and Maria Schneider as The Girl. Sweet Ruin imagines the ruins of Antonioni's script, as if it was somehow actually filmed, but then lost, damaged, and forgotten.

Blood Work playfully explores the mise-en-scène of the horror film genre, alternating between shots of a messy stagehand that helps the video’s main character, "blood," splash, drip and ooze. Using everyday objects in the studio, the video and soundtrack combine to question off-screen space and the mechanization of illusion.

Banned in Canada, Hydro-Lévesque mixes Canadian history with abstract surrealism, fusing the formalist stylizations of Guy Maddin with avant-garde Québec separatist propaganda to deliver a crazed, subversive incantation of the Canadian nationality.