Founded in 1996, the San Francisco-based MadCat Women’s International Film Festival is a forum that highlights avant-garde films and videos by women directors. The festival focuses on work that challenges the use of sound and image and explores notions of visual storytelling.
Directors manipulate the medium creating the visual delights offered in this series of gorgeous 16mm contemporary avant-garde films.
March 18 (Friday) 7 pm
Directed by Gretchen Hogue
US, 2004, color, 10 min.
Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining are re-photographed, focusing on the films' female protagonists and their gradual subjugation by horror and retaliation, instigated by their husbands' brutal betrayals.
Directed by Sandra Cheng
US, 2003, color, 2 min.
Defined as a love for teachers, especially occurring when the student experiences symptoms of schizophrenia, Pedant Philia is a hand-drawn story of unrequited love.
Directed by Beatriz Flores and Sonia Malfa
US, 2003, color, 10 min.
Immigrant women discuss the acquisition of taste, rituals, memory, the carrying on of tradition and making a home in a foreign land.
Directed by Christina Battle
US/Canada, 2004, color, 3 min.
Gentle four-legged friends are presented in a sumptuous wash of color, optically printed to obey the maker.
Directed by Angela Reginato
US, 2004, color, 3 min.
The secret schematics of 60s beach movies are revealed in this found-footage film in which scratched-off emulsion reveals the sexual undertow overtaking Frankie and Annette.
Directed by Kelly Spivey
US, 2003, color, 7 min.
Using animation, the filmmaker explores a girl’s introduction to the class wars.
Directed by Michele Stanley
Canada, 2003, b/w, 3 min.
Reality, dream and hallucination intermingle when a single, disturbing moment becomes a continuously looped fragment of memory.
Directed by Diane Cheklich
US, 2003, b/w, 8 min.
High-contrast shots of seedy hotels and dial-a-savior billboards are collaged together as late-night radio evangelist dispenses wisdom and hope to lost souls.
Directed by Elizabeth Block
US, 2004, color, 6 min.
Block presents a visual poem of text, color and light. Drawings on clear film leader are exposed to light and re-photographed as digital pixels that are then projected backwards.
Directed by Chelsea Walton
US, 2004, color, 4 min.
This hand-processed, optically printed love poem explores an intimate, roaming rendezvous. Lush and colorful, the rhythm of editing resembles a heartbeat.
Directed by Joell Hallowell and Jacalyn White
US, 2004, color, 17 min.
Hallowell and White’s humorous and devastating found-footage extravaganza, complete with 50s advertisements, spiritual audiotapes, obsolete medical films and a star-studded cast that includes Janis Joplin, Timothy Leary and Shirley MacLaine.
Using animation, documentary and experimental filmmaking, this series reveals how artists question their governments and challenge their actions.
March 18 (Friday) 9 pm
Directed by Claudia Herbst
Germany, 2001, color, 5 min.
Combining rapid fire editing of animation, still photographs and live-action sequences, Herbst reveals a national tragedy through her very personal story.
Directed by Kiyoko Segawa
Japan/US, 2004, color, 3 min.
A surreal animation about a family that tries to ignore impending war.
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
US, 2004, color, 12 min.
Reichardt appropriates and illustrates an NPR radio interview with a mother whose son was killed clearing mines in Iraq just after President Bush declared the end to major combat.
Directed by Barbara Klutinis
US, 2003, color, 3 min.
With an eerie soundtrack and footage of a boy about to jump off an unidentified ledge, Klutinis creates anticipation and fear of an unknown horror ahead.
Directed by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
US, 2004, color, 25 min.
In this riveting video, a former CIA source reveals how the agency constructed his false identity. Footage of a burial at sea and shredded classified documents are animated and reconstructed to reveal a complex story of cover-ups and the complexity of defining the truth.
Directed by Diane Nerwen
US, 2003, color, 5 min.
Oil, flying horses and tales of liberation swirl together in this Technicolor action adventure fantasy starring Charlton Heston as a swaggering Texan empire-builder in Baghdad and Conrad Veidt as his nemesis.
Directed by Lori Hiris
US, 1994, b/w, 12 min.
Using the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill broadcast as its soundscape, Cross Examination is a chilling reflection on politics, race, power dynamics and gender relations in America.
Directed by Lori Hiris
US, 2003, b/w and color, 12 min.
The Invisible Hand is a hand-drawn history of corporate corruption from Enron, to Halliburton to Marthagate.
Harvard Film Archive is a division of Fine Arts Library of the Harvard College Library.
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2013
President and Fellows of Harvard College..