What is a filmmaker? It is this vague, perhaps vain question that Travis Wilkerson hoped to answer clearly when he went to Cuba to question Santiago Alvarez, a legend of militant cinema. Although he had seen none of his films, Wilkerson did an interview with the master that quickly became something of a combined lesson in film and history, with Alvarez presenting his many essays and adding commentary. On returning from his trip, Wilkerson was very disappointed. The camera had recorded nothing of these very warm-hearted, instructive sessions, neither sound nor pictures. Technology had let him down. Alvarez's face and voice vanished, almost at the same time as himself. So only his films remain. His portrait remains to be done, to be made from scratch, from memory. This is why this homage to Alvarez is presented, according to a certain poetic tradition, in the form of a mélange. It includes Wilkerson's autobiographical parts, archive footage, excerpts of films made for Cuban television and pictures taken today, assembled with no concern for hierarchy or precedence.

A great blow-up character succumbs to time

By manipulating time, we wanted to evoke both the danger as well as the power and euphoria of collective experience.

The skin of a teddy bear and its synthetic insides....

Chinese Ghost Story is a poetic essay in which history and landscape converge to explore the construction of the railroad where 1,300 Chinese laborers lost their lives. There are no stories without places, and places are largely silent to what occurs. The retelling of Pu Songling's (1640-1715) “Kon-Sun-Ju-Liang” sets the counterpoint for this tale of the 1869 Transcontinental Railroad. Throughout the American West, we searched for those absent from the 19th century A.J. Russell photograph documenting the joining together of the eastern and western United States.

With wit and savvy, Kalin combines text, graphics and flowers with musical and political quotation to comment on the disjuncture between a conservative, medicalized discourse that describes homosexuality as both "unnatural" and "dangerous," and the possibilities of liberation involved in embracing the criminality of the "unnatural." A quote from Angela Carter's Sadeian Woman ("Criminality may present itself as a kind of saintly self-mastery, an absolute rejection of hypocrisy"), disco music, and hothouse flowers serve as counterpoints to fundamentalist agit-prop about gay sexuality.