Fests and events, 11/19.

"Two years ago Sundance opened with a Brett Morgen's animated doc Chicago 10, and it's just been announced that the upcoming iteration of the festival (only 57 days to go!) will kick off with more animation," notes IFC's Alison Willmore: "Mary and Max, a claymation drama, is the feature debut of Australian director Adam Elliot, who's otherwise known for a spectacular set of claymation shorts that includes Harvie Crumpet, which won the 2003 Best Animated Short Oscar."

Free Films Made Freely: The Experimental Cinema of Paolo Gioli is a one-hour program happening tonight at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Writing for Artforum, Jason Anderson notes that Gioli's "tactics have included creating collages of found footage, abrading and painting on leader, and, most infamously, constructing pinhole cameras from bread loaves and seashells. Closely related to his experimental photographic work (which has already wended its way into the collections of MoMA and the Centre Pompidou), the often dazzling results comprise an iconoclastic and prescient body of film work that's only now coming to wider attention."

"For the third year running, MoMA's Department of Film, in association with IFP and its quarterly publication Filmmaker, screens the five nominees for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award." Tomorrow through Monday. And Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay is asking "each of the filmmakers to send me a short statement about the relationship of their film to the world, filmmaking or otherwise, around them." So far, he's run answers from Nina Paley (Sita Sings the Blues) and Tom Quinn (The New Year Parade.

"Thanksgiving is a time for wholesome family togetherness," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "All the more reason, then, to get your sex on Holiday Heat, a pre-Turkey Day celebration of retro sleaze." Tomorrow through Saturday.

Ed Halter: "This Saturday, November 22, I'll be part of a mini-symposium at EAI called Expanded Video."

"With physical nature as his muse, Andrej Zdravic doesn't capture beauty in the mundane but in the microcosmic," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice; "for more than three decades, the Slovenian-born film and sound artist has proved that hypnotic elemental poetry can literally be found under a rock (or underwater, over the clouds, et al)." The Films of Andrej Zdravic runs at Anthology Film Archives from Friday through Sunday.

"The Ballerina Ballroom of Dreams - Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins's heavenly film festival, which was held in Nairn this summer - is to travel to Beijing," reports Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian. Related: Peter Knegt has a good long talk with Swinton at indieWIRE.

At Twitch, Rodney notes that Jasper Sharp, author of Behind the Pink Curtain and co-founder of Midnight Eye, will be speaking on "The History and Development of Japanese Pink Film" in London on December 3 as part of the BFI's Wild Japan season.

"Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of some of Kenneth Anger's most recent short films - hosted by Mr Anger himself." C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2008 12:48 PM