Jenny Conte

I’m very pleased that, for our annual Julydoscope free event at 7:00p.m. on July 16 at Discovery Green Park, we have landed one of the greatest arts films of the year, Sonita. This film picked up both the Jury and Audience prizes for World Cinema at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Sonita Alizadeh is the 17-year old Afghan teenager who, while living in Iran, made a viral rap video that protested her family’s efforts to sell her as a child bride. The film was directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, whose Going Up the Stairs, about an untrained Iranian woman artist who attracts international attention, screened to great acclaim in HCAF 2012. Maghami is a creative and engaged director, and not a detached observer of Sonita’s plight. Her film is a wrenching, ultimately exhilarating experience that you don’t want to miss.

Sonita is a fine musical talent, and the film’s performances will likely have people dancing in the park. However, she is an even more inspiring human rights activist. I had the pleasure of meeting her when I brought her to the Ashland Independent Film Festival this past April. When she appeared onstage at the end of the film, surprising the audience who had been unaware of her presence, Sonita stood and acknowledged the rapturous applause with tremendous dignity. She then answered questions eloquently and spoke passionately about Sonita’s Campaign to battle child marriage.

She also connected with another Afghani refugee in the audience, Arash Seddique, who was the subject of another film at Ashland, Alexandria Bombach’s How We Choose, which you can check out here. It was clear that they both missed their homeland terribly, but were inspired by each other’s courage.

Sonita’s musical studies are keeping her from attending Julydoscope,  but I am working hard on attracting other filmmakers and artists who are subjects of their films to our annual festival in November. In the meantime, Julydoscope, our biggest annual event apart from the festival, will supplement the screening of Sonita with exciting live performances of dance, hip-hop, and spoken word, so you are in for a memorable night.

I attended the Cannes Film Festival last week, after skipping it for the last two years. Cannes can be frustrating without a high-level access badge and, in 2013, my market credentials were just good enough to get me, and then strand me, on ticket waiting lists. As with most festivals, though, having experience and getting advice from others (including Marian Luntz from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, who also attended this year) helped me better navigate the event, and I had much greater success.

Marian and I got terrific seats in the Palais for the premiere screening of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, her first American feature film. I’m a great admirer of Arnold’s British films, Red Road and Fish Tank, and even the two episodes she directed of my favorite current TV series, Transparent. European directors’ visions of America have generated some terrific films (including Paris, Texas, Stroszek, Stop the Pounding Heart, etc.) and American Honey is a road movie filled with a foreigner’s perceptive and humorous observations of contemporary American culture. Somehow, Arnold managed to elicit a strong and disciplined performance from Shia LeBoeuf. And Sasha Lane from Frisco, Texas, who plays opposite Shia, gave the most dazzling acting debut of the festival.

My personal favorite this year was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry, the second of his autobiographical features after The Dance of Reality. Jodorowsky, famously the director of El Topo, is still bursting with surrealistic, cinematic ideas, and watching the film was exhilarating and, at the end, deeply moving. The Palme d’Or winner, I, Daniel Blake, by the director Ken Loach, painted a devastating picture of the deteriorating welfare state, and I admired it, but would not have given it the Palme. The Golden Eye documentary prize went to Eryk Rocha’s passionate, experimental film exploring the Latin American film movement, Cinema Novo, in which his father, Glauber Rocha, was a leading figure. I will definitely pursue the Jodorowsky and Rocha films for HCAF 2016.

My Cannes festival navigation skills improved this year, but still have a way to go. I was shut out of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, adored by critics I respect. I did manage to get into one of the hot ticket screenings, Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, starring Kristen Stewart, to my regret. Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, which we screened two years ago in HCAF, proved Stewart has more range as an actress than many of us had realized. Here, she is trapped in an un-scary, meta-horror film that, like Sils Maria, is also, but less interestingly, meta on the subject of celebrity. It was a big disappointment from one of my favorite directors, but, luckily, most of what I saw was strong. I can attest, then, that the new crop of art films coming out of of Cannes and headed to HCAF, MFAH, and your other favorite venues, is a rich one.

The 2015 festival is over, the best-attended and received of the seven (out of seven) I’ve programmed. Appreciative expressions by both festival audiences and guest artists have been conveyed to me and other festival personnel in many messages and ways. These have wiped away my exhaustion, and so I’m recharged and nearly ready to get started on HCAF 2016.

First, however, I want to reminisce. I’m reaching into my iPhone and the festival’s photo albums to share a few favorite images and memories. Opening day began with a visit to Bun B and Anthony Pinn’s “Hip-Hop and Religion” class at Rice University. I escorted the class’s special guest, Christopher “Play” Martin, seen here being greeted by Bun. What a phenomenal interviewer Bun B is, as he proved again that night on stage talking about Janis’ Port Arthur roots with Amy Berg after our Texas premiere of Janis: Little Girl Blue. Sitting in front of me in class, greatly enjoying Play’s reflections on hip-hop music, dance, fashion, and fame, was the amazing Lynn Wyatt, who posed with Play later at our opening night reception at the MFAH.

Cut to two nights later, and you’re backstage with me at the Cinema Arts Celebration at Brasil, where Kid ‘n Play were about to launch into their “rap battle” from House Party (after a microphone glitch was solved in the nick of time with the help of Brasil’s calm and collected owner, Dan Fergus). A Facebook post of their timeless dance number at Brasil has garnered nearly two million views. How are we ever going to top this party? Well, we will certainly try.

Technical issues also created suspense at the screening of Satellite Beach, the culmination of our glorious CineSpace Day at the MFAH. Luke Wilson managed to get on Skype for the first time ever, after a bout of the flu kept him from flying to Houston. When the connection was made after 20 minutes, during which time co-director Andrew Wilson and producer Steve Eckelman and moderator Joe Leydon kept the crowd informed and entertained, Luke burst onto the screen, looming like Big Brother over his actual big brother Andrew. Dosed on Robitussin, lounging in the kitchen with a dog ambling in and out of the frame, Luke was comfortable and hilarious. We should definitely do more Skypes with guest stars in the future.

Here’s another favorite image from the festival, photographed by Jeanne Liotta, showing Julia Oldham, Jeanne’s fellow artist in the CineSpace gallery installation at She Works Flexible on Dunlavy and Westheimer. Julia is standing alongside a section of Kidlat Tahimik’s temporary installation, depicting the allure and resistance to Hollywood by Third World filmmakers, in the gallery. Kidlat himself can be seen photographing the installation, which he and his son carried with them from the Philippines. The CineSpace exhibition of outer space-themed media art works by Liotta, Oldham, Laura Heit, Kelly Sears, and David Janesko is on view through December 5, and, take my word for it, you should run to see this.

A few other unforgettable moments:

As I moderated the post-Krisha discussion with Krisha Fairchild and Trey Edward Shults, recipient of the first Levantine Emerging Artist Award, his cast (mostly members of his family) stormed the stage and joined in one of the most lively and moving discussions I can remember.

Live music at our festival was more lively and varied than ever before. Audiences who arrived at Sundance Cinemas for The Winding Stream: The Carters, The Cashes, and the Course of Country Music, were treated to a pre-screening concert by the dazzling Americana group, Hogan and Moss. And audiences who came to see The Jones Family Will Make a Way at the MFAH and Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten at the Asia Society heard stirring performances by the Jones Family Singers and Chhom Nimol and Zac Holtzman of Dengue Fever.

There were so many wonderful guest artists at this year’s event, and they were very happy to socialize together in the Lancaster Hotel, visit the Rothko exhibit at the MFAH and the Menil Treasure Rooms together, and, especially, attend each other’s programs. I will have more to say about their events in our Yearbook, which will be published and made available online in mid-winter. Each guest took home a whistle (seen below) specially carved by Connie Roberts to reflect the work the artist presented in the festival. They could not have been more delighted.

On opening night of our seventh annual Festival, a great musical artist from Port Arthur, Texas, Bun B, will pay homage to his illustrious predecessor from the same hometown, Janis Joplin. Bun will lead the Q&A with Oscar nominated director Amy Berg, who has made a provocative film exploring Joplin’s music and her complicated relationship with her native state.

And so will begin the most Texas-centric Festival we have ever mounted. It’s partly so because of the Texas artists whose stories we’re featuring, including Doug Sahm, whose filmed biography will be told and hosted here by the great Austin-based music writer, now filmmaker, Joe Nick Patoski. Sahm, like Janis, took off and achieved fame in flower-powered San Francisco. Unlike Janis, Sahm lived long enough to reconnect deeply with his musical roots, returning to launch the Tex-Mex super group, The Texas Tornados.

The primary reason for our Texas emphasis is the explosion of cinematic talent here. Raised in Houston, Trey Edward Shults filmed Krisha last year in nearby Montgomery, and the film’s cinematic and emotional power blew everyone away at the SXSW Film Festival last March; it swept both the Grand Jury and Audience Prizes. Shults and his aunt, lead performer Krisha Fairchild, will be joined by other cast and crew as he screens his film at the MFAH and receives the first Levantine Emerging Artist Award from Levantine Films. Patrick Wang, born in Sugar Land, is returning home to present two independent films that have garnered much acclaim in the indie film community, In the Family and The Grief of Others. And former Houston SWAMP and Austin Film Society staff member Katie Cokinos is bringing her debut feature, I Dream Too Much, accompanied by its producer, our state’s most highly regarded director, Richard Linklater. Rick has been making biennial visits to our Festival since we launched it in 2009 with his wonderful Me and Orson Welles.

Given our fixation on our home city and state this year, it was only natural that we turned to our most illustrious agency, NASA, for a cinematic partnership. NASA has put up its amazing archive of space footage and photography online, and together we invited filmmakers around the world to create short films utilizing this material. 194 films were submitted and 16 exceptional short films were chosen to be screened at the CineSpace Awards Screening on Friday, November 13. Five of those, chosen by Richard Linklater and NASA judges, will earn cash prizes, and the audience will also get to vote on an audience prize winner. The awards screening is the centerpiece event of CineSpace Day at the MFAH, which will also include continuous screenings of Marco Brambilla’s Apollo XVIII and a free presentation by Time Magazine filmmakers of their ongoing online documentary series on astronaut Scott Kelly, A Year in Space. That’s not all, because more illustrious Texans are dropping by – William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert will present a 20^th anniversary screening of their Oscar nominated Apollo 13, and Luke and Andrew Wilson will wrap up the day with their hilarious, space shuttle-crazy short film, Satellite Beach.

CineSpace will blast off from the MFAH and land at She Works Flexible gallery beside Brasil on Dunlavy and Westheimer, where artists Jeanne Liotta, Laura Heit, and Julia Oldham will present interactive, multimedia space-themed installations and performances on view through December 12. It will also pick up a Filipino passenger, Kidlat Tahimik, who will present a screening, an installation, and a live performance at Aurora Picture Show on November 13. Tahimik’s first two films, The Perfumed Nightmare and Who Invented the YoYo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy (both in our program), fantasized the creation of a Third World space program to rival NASA. Tahimik also says that the Apollo 6 mission inspired him to become a filmmaker, and that a visit to Houston and NASA has been a lifelong dream.

There is much more to read about in the highlights and film blurbs sections that follow, including our tribute to Kartemquin Films with its legendary founder, Gordon Quinn and documentary scholar and activist Patricia Aufderheide, and two presentations by the brilliant director, cinematographer, and theorist on black aesthetics, Arthur Jafa. These programs are co-sponsored with Aurora Picture Show, Project Row Houses, and SWAMP, just three of the many Houston arts organizations who collaborate with Houston Cinema Arts Society all year on planning and mounting our ambitious schedule.

Of course, the heart of our program is the extensive collection of the best new films by and about artists, and this year’s program includes a special emphasis on “Fringe Theater and Politics,” with three visiting experimental theater directors from Estonia and Israel, and on architecture, since we have joined forces with the excellent ArCH Film Festival and welcomed them into our program. As always, we are striving to highlight film’s interactions with other art forms with live music and film performances by Kid ‘n Play, Jones Family Singers, Dengue Fever’s Chhom Nimol and Zac Holtzman, and Hogan and Moss. Live-ness, embodied in our many Q&As with guest artists, the interactivity of our media installations, and our many musical and theatrical performances, is what festivals like ours aim to inject back into the movie-going, screen-gazing experience. So come alive with us for a week in November!

I’m sitting in an Industry Suite surrounded by many other industry professionals (distributors, sales agents, producers, exhibitors, etc.), and that’s the bubble I’ll be in all week.

I’ve been coming to this festival for 31 years (!) and I do miss the excitement of the public screenings, and their extremely enthusiastic and intelligent audiences (it always amazed me how much I learned from listening in on people’s film conversations while on movie lines).   The enthusiasm can be notoriously deceptive; distributors may sense from an ovation and festival buzz that a film is going to be a hit, outbid their rivals for the rights, then see the film sink in the cruel indie film marketplace. In spite of this, thankfully, festivals remain a utopian realm for the appreciation of cinematic art, defying the multiplex marketplace.

So many industry pros make the trek to Toronto that the organizers have created a parallel festival of screenings just for those of us with industry or press badges. It’s great, because the lines aren’t massive and it’s easy to move between the fourteen Scotiabank Theater screens and see five or six films a day. The experience, though, can be the opposite of the public screenings. Industry people are too cool for school when it comes to responding with laughter and other signs of enthusiasm. They also walk out a lot, which is disconcerting, but may very well be because they are sampling each film and don’t want to miss the start of another one.

That happened during London Road, a lavish film of a British stage musical with a remarkable Steve Reichian avant-garde score. The actors sing the words of actual working class Londoners responding to a serial killing in their neighborhood. It’s a neo-realist movie musical and I’ve never seen anything like it, and I loved it.

Other films that impressed me a lot, and are prospects for our upcoming festival of arts films, include Gillian Armstrong’s The Women He Undressed, about the gay Australian costume designer Orry-Kelly. It’s great to see Armstrong (director of wonderful features like My Brilliant Career and Hightide) back in the saddle, and having so much playful fun with the documentary form. I was also impressed with the new Chet Baker biopic, Born To Be Blue, starring Ethan Hawke in an impressive, committed performance. Just yesterday, I was talking with another programmer about how awful biopics tend to be, and then this fine one comes along, that barely hits a wrong note.

My next industry screening will be Wavelengths, the nightly avant-garde program, curated by the amazing Andrea Picard, that’s a combined industry and public screening. It’s a privilege to see the challenging, totally un-commercial films in Wavelengths projected with exquisite sound and image to a packed, appreciative house of cinephiles.

Wavelengths will be followed by Janis: Little Girl Blue, a film about the glorious singer from Port Chester, Texas, that could be a perfect choice for one of my few remaining HCAF slots.

At the moment, I am swamped with preview copies of new films by and about artists, all in consideration for HCAF 2015. I solicited each and every one of these from their creators or distributors, after noticing them in the schedules of other festivals, seeing them reviewed in Variety and elsewhere, or having them recommended to me by festival partners, board members, and colleagues in the field.

None of them came in unsolicited, and this puzzles many filmmakers, since it is not the way most festivals do business. Most festivals have an open call for submissions, and filmmakers check the website of festivals or festival submission services like WithoutABox to find out about the festival’s deadline, entry fee, and interests.

Filmmakers who wish to have their films considered for our program receive the following message:

The Houston Cinema Arts Festival is a curated festival and does not conduct an open call for film submissions. Our artistic director solicits preview screeners of films that fit our mission to present “films by and about visual, performing, and literary artists.” We are particularly interested in films of high artistic quality that benefit from theatrical presentation, and we give special consideration to films made by Texas filmmakers. If you have a new film made in the past two years that you think may be of interest to us, then please do send an email with a description of your film, with links to reviews if available, to Richard@cinemartsociety.org. If the film seems promising, then we will contact you and request a screener link and no entry fee.

 I see the Houston Cinema Arts Festival as a “temporary museum,” a term Oberhausen Short Film Festival Director Lars Henrik Gass has used to describe curated festivals. It’s an exhibition of cinematic art that attempts to cover a broad range of art forms, and also contains mini-exhibitions around themes like “street photography” in 2014 and “space” in 2015. As curator, I select all the films, but not entirely on my own, since I solicit ideas and jointly program with many festival partners, including Marian Luntz at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Mary Magsamen at the Aurora Picture Show, Evan Wildstein at the Asia Society, Ryan Dennis at Project Row Houses, and many more.

 There is one, brand new exception to this rule and that is the CineSpace competition, which is our open call for films that rework sounds and images from space supplied by our partner, NASA. The deadline for entries is July 31, and there are substantial prizes of up to $10,000 and no entry fees! We expect many submissions, and so a pre-screening committee will join me in reviewing the submissions and making recommendations to the competition’s judge, Richard Linklater. You can expect to see the top films from this contest at a special screening during the HCAF week.

It’s May, and, for me, that means that planning for the next Houston Cinema Arts Festival will start ramping up. The Cannes Film Festival has just started, and so upcoming fall and winter releases related to our arts theme are just now coming into view. For example, Paolo Sorrentino’s (The Great Beauty) new film, Youth, starring Michael Caine as an aging composer, will premiere in the next few days and I’ll be keeping my eye on the film’s reception and distribution plans.

Since last November’s festival ended, my primary programming efforts have turned to Cinema Pacific, a spring festival I’ve been programming in Eugene and Portland, Oregon since 2010, and that wrapped its sixth edition on May 3. The two festivals I program complement each other. As I wrote in an earlier blog entry, learning about the importance of James Blue to Houston’s film history sparked my efforts to help gain him greater recognition in Oregon, where he was raised and educated. This has inspired several Cinema Pacific screenings of films made and inspired by Blue, including this year’s presentation of a remarkably well-made parody of Hamlet that Blue made while an undergraduate at the University of Oregon.

Also, this year, I took a portion of Deborah Colton Gallery’s 2013 Jonas Mekas exhibition, on which HCAS had collaborated when we jointly brought Jonas Mekas to Houston, and installed it at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene. It’s been a pleasure collaborating with Deborah, and exposing audiences in both Houston and Eugene to this major artist’s cinematic and photographic works.

I have, on several occasions, used Cinema Pacific as an out-of-town tryout for programs that, when they really clicked with audiences, earned an invitation to Houston. People were blown away by Hao Jie’s film The Love Songs of Tiedan in Eugene in 2013; in Houston later that year, I was able to go further and invite the two magnetic leads, Yelan Jiang and Feng Si, to sing and dance onstage at the Asia Society after the screening.

This year, the featured artist at Cinema Pacific was the “father of the New Filipino Cinema,” Kidlat Tahimik, whose classic film The Perfumed Nightmare was a revelation to many. I realized that the film’s fantasy of creating a Third World space program to rival NASA’s will be a wonderful complement to our CineSpace competition. What’s more, Tahimik crosses over art forms, supplementing his screenings with a live performance and a sculptural installation, and so he is perfect for our Houston festival. I have extended the invitation, and you can look forward to meeting Kidlat in November.

HCAF’s screenings in the Brasil Courtyard were so successful last November, that Brasil owner Dan Fergus invited us to come back with a monthly series. I’d been thinking about the “Artist’s Choice” idea for a while – inviting artists to select and talk about a favorite film on their own chosen art form. There never seemed to be room for this in the always-overcrowded festival program, and so Dan Fergus’ invitation provided the opportunity I had been waiting for.

The first artist I approached was Geoff Winningham, the renowned photographer (Friday Night at the Coliseum and nine other books) who has been teaching at Rice since 1969. Geoff is a familiar face at Brasil, and has shown new work at the gallery next door, most recently last fall. Geoff had two photography film suggestions right off the bat—Michael Almereyda’s William Eggleston in the Real World and Thom Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxographer. A tough choice, but Andersen’s 1975 film has only just been restored and eminently deserves rediscovery, and so Muybridge won and will kick off the series on April 20. A connection between Andersen and Winningham is the influence on both by James Blue, who advised Andersen while he was working on his film at UCLA and who became Winningham’s good friend and colleague in the Seventies at Rice University.

My next invitation went out to Greg Boyd, artistic director at the Alley Theatre. Greg recently moderated a great conversation with Julie Taymor on the opening night of our last festival, and had written us a nice appreciation of the other theater films we had screened, especially Rumstick Road with Spalding Gray. Greg responded with an impressive list of favorite theater films, including The Band Wagon, Floating Weeds, The Seventh Seal, All About Eve, Limelight, All That Jazz, Children of Paradise, To Be or Not To Be, and Story of the Last Chrysanthemum. Also on the list, to my surprise and delight, was the 1973 horror/comedy Theater of Blood, starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg. That one won out because, unlike most of Greg’s other selections, it has a manageable running time for a weeknight screening (June 16), and because I can’t wait to hear what Greg has to say about it.

Our third Artist’s Choice guest will be Trish Herrera of the Mydolls, whose significant claim to movie fame is her band’s appearance in Paris Texas, Wim Wenders’ film shot in Houston. At the top of Trish’s list were two films that are at the top of my own roster of favorite rock n’ roll movies, Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues and Quadrophenia. We went with the Who’s Quadrophenia since Cocksucker Blues can and should only be seen on the big MFAH screen. You must come on August 17 and see this fantastic British neo-realist musical with a great Who soundtrack and a striking performance by a young Mr. Sting.

Which artists should I invite to select future Artist’s Choice screenings? Suggestions are welcome, and if you’re an artist yourself, tell me on Facebook what films you’d nominate and you may get an invitation from me to come present a film at Brasil.

(November 23, 2014)  The sixth annual Houston Cinema Arts Festival, the sixth that I’ve programmed, came to its supposed end last Sunday. It then continued for four more days with our “after-fest” Spotlight on Texas and some command performances of festival hits, all in Sundance Cinemas. Now, I think we have truly wrapped it up, and I can only keep this festival running by playing back my memories of an amazing, though freezing, week.

As in the past, the “live cinema” performances were the most memorable. I’m still stunned by the power of the individual testimonies by audience members presenting their family photographs at the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow hosted by Thomas Allen Harris. Each was like a short play, a piece of spontaneous theater, and a powerful extension of Harris’ film, Through a Lens Darkly. It’s the third time I’ve seen Deke Weaver’s Wolf, and the excellent projection and sound at the Rice Media Center elicited a great performance by Deke. Heather and Benjamin Epps’ Revolve on Camera: The Performances, complemented by live dancing by the Spring, TX` Revolve Dance Company, was a flawless show, adored by the MFAH audience. The Epps’ short film Angsters, with its blend of dance, music, Houston public art, and cinematic experimentation, could be the emblematic film of our film festival and the city of Houston itself.

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Our field trips were particularly satisfying this year. The high school students so appreciated the inspiring presences of Tim Guinee and Thomas Allen Harris following the showings of One Armed Man and Through a Lens Darkly at the MFAH and Eldorado Ballroom. The English filmmakers Dan Poole and Giles Terera were such vivid presences in their film Muse of Fire and then via Skype for the Q&A, that many students happily posed with the projected artists after the show.

I’m so glad that our efforts to bring the subjects of our films, as well as the directors, landed us both Born to Fly’s director Catherine Gund and choreographer Elizabeth Streb, as well as director Jennifer Grausman and art forger Mark Landis of Art and Craft. Grausman wrote that her screening “was one of the best screenings/audiences we’ve ever had,” and Landis’ pithy and hilarious comments during the Q&A were the highlight of the week for many.

Post-film discussions were stronger than ever this year. The Q&A’s with James Ivory, led by three different moderators (Ernie Manouse, Rich Levy, and me), gave those who attended all three rich insight into this great director’s career. It was amazing how much information and illumination Julie Taymor packed into her 20 minutes of conversation with Greg Boyd! I wasn’t there, but I heard that Bun B did a brilliant interview with director Daniel Ziv after Jalanan, and I hope to have Bun back to host future Q&A’s. I was there to moderate a “Meet the Makers” brunch panel that gathered an inter-generational array of guest artists including the Epps, Gund, Ivory, Lee Caplin, and Marcelo Gomes. It was inspiring–especially hearing from Gomes about the support that Brazil gives its film artists, something that our own country should emulate.

The most satisfying part of the festival for me, happily, is still running through December 10, and so the festival is not, in fact, over. The Brandon Gallery exhibition Street Scenes: Street Photography and the Moving Image, came together beautifully, thanks to the hard work of installation coordinators Camilo Gonzalez and Stephen Wilson and the gallery’s Lynne McCabe and Dan Fergus. The photographic and video works by James Nares, Ken Jacobs, Jem Cohen, and Cheryl Dunn complement each other and fit the space perfectly. You should run to see the show, and then stay for a while to catch all the videos that make this exhibition an ongoing street film festival on its own. The partnership with Brasil and the Brandon, which included a fabulous Cinema Arts Celebration party, will continue year-round (watch for future announcements), so this festival never has to quit.