With Last Remaining Board Members Bryan Poyser and Spencer Parsons in attendance
WARNING: Mature sexual content
After an 11-year stint as one of the most pioneering film festivals in the country, Austin's dearly departed Cinematexas International Shorts Film Festival will have one last hurrah at the Aurora Picture Show. This will be two days of odd, subversive and avant-garde Cinematexas quality shorts programming. Please join co-founder Bryan Poyser and curator-at-large Spencer Parsons as they deliver a eulogy to this University of Texas student-run festival that started as a part-time hobby and became an internationally renowned festival. The Cinematexas Eulogy at Aurora Picture Show Friday, June 13 and Saturday, June 14, will pay tribute to the festival's final "Viking Funeral" that happened in Austin in December of 2007.
On Friday, Aurora will present a series of films from the Cinematexas series Ragnarok and Ragnarol. Festival founders always joked that they would go down in flames and lived every year as if it were their last, and over the years they became known for gritty and rebellious genre-busting film. But rather than have a retrospective about the past, Parsons and Poyser prefer to live in the present by screening a compilation of current works from some of their best contributors, alumni and friends. And to spike the affair with a little danger, they will also screen extracts from the audition tape of Laz Rojas, an incomparable one-man-band who may be the secret Cindy Sherman of video art. Written, shot, edited, and acted entirely by Mr. Rojas, these elaborately staged demos were meant to help sell his unproduced screenplays, but instead opened a window on a fascinating imagined world.
Friday's films will include:
Lunchfilm by Roger Beebe
The How and Why Series #1: Stamps by Paul Tarrago
More British Sounds by William E. Jones
Never Heard the Word Impossible by Stephanie Gray
Other Turbans by Darrin Martin
To Love or to Die by Scott Stark
Nocturnal Doubling by Daniel Cockburn
Return of the Black Tower by Jennet Thomas
And...3 pieces by Laz Rojas
For information on the second screening of shorts adapted from the classic Moby Dick, please click on Saturday.
RESERVE OR PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
In addition to co-founding Cinematexas, Bryan Poyser co-wrote and produced the 2006 Burnt Orange production The Cassidy Kids and wrote and directed Dear Pillow, which was nominated for "Someone to Watch" at the 2005 Independent Spirit Awards. He currently serves as the Director of Artist Services for the Austin Film Society.
Spencer Parsons is former Senior Programmer for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival and has taught film production at the University of Texas for the past 7 years. He has recently completed his first feature film, I'll Come Running, which premieres at this year's Los Angeles Film Festival, and he will be joining the faculty at Northwestern University to teach filmmaking for the 2008/9 academic year.