2003 Philadelphia Film Festival, Part 2
13 April 2003
Sunday, 6:16 PM
More film fest stuff this weekend. I caught a little bit of the Lost Film Fest 8.0 on Friday, including 156 Rivington, a documentary about the legendary New York arts/activism space ABC No Rio, and a selection of short films and interesting copyright lecture by Carrie McLaren, curator of the infamous Illegal Art exhibition and editor of Stay Free magazine. Then I had to fly back across town for the Philadelphia Film Festival presentation of 2LDK at the Ritz East, which did not meet my high standards for ingenuity in ultra-violence, so I didn’t find it quite so riotously funny as the rest of the audience, though I did enjoy its clever cinematography.
On Saturday, at the Independence Seaport Museum, was another disappointing shorts program, called Digital Stories for a Digital World. Geoff Adams’ Birdbeat (fugue) and Stefan Nadelman’s Terminal Bar were the two most worthwhile films in the program, which was otherwise a lifeless pastiche of forgettable and occasionally truly awful films. It was preceded by a stale panel discussion with five of animation’s “Best and Brightest,” three of whom were conspicuously Philadelphia educators.
I would have felt defeated by the day had it not ended as well as it did: Dirty Three and Shannon Wright played an awesome, 3+ hour show at the TLA. Shannon Wright played the guitar with her whole body. Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis provided hilariously long-winded explanations for the origins of each composition the band played. It was a happy night of sad music.
Filed under: Film, Music, Philadelphia
