With Last Remaining Board Members Bryan Poyser and Spencer Parsons in attendance
WARNING: Mature 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 for gritty and rebellious genre-busting film. 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. For more information, please see Friday's listing.
On Saturday afternoon, Parsons will screen pieces from his collaborative project with filmmakers James Fotopoulos and Ben Coonley entitled The Living Whale: A Marathon Misreading of Moby Dick. Together the three filmmakers commissioned dozens of filmmakers and multimedia artists to tackle each of Moby Dick's 135 chapters, plus the epilogue and an etymology. Aurora will screen a selection of these works. These films were originally presented as part of the Fusebox Festival, and Parsons has threatened to show the entire compilation of the full book someday as well.
Saturday's films include:
EXTRACTS (provided by a sub-sub Librarian) by Ben Coonley
CHAPTER X: A Bosom Companion by Ivan Lozano
CHAPTER XV: Chowder by Elizabeth Abrams
CHAPTER XXX: The Pipe by Kate Watson
CHAPTER XXXII: Cetology, or 9 Feet Deep by Lee Webster
CHAPTER LVII: Paint, Mountains, Stars by Adam Sultan
CHAPTER LXVI: The Shark Massacre by Spencer Parsons
CHAPTER CXIX: The Candles by James Fotopoulos
...And more!
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.
Co-conspirators on this project are Ben Coonley, responsible for the viral video hit "Valentine for Perfect Strangers" and James Fotopoulos, whose work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, and his features "Migrating Forms" and "Back Against the Wall" are available from Facets.