Hey Friends!
So, it seems we’ve been neglect in updating our news feed! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few months!!
Why I Left Califorina: Films and Videos by Jason Robinson
August 18th – Grail Moviehouse
This program of new and recent shorts explores the boundaries of contemporary nonfiction filmmaking through personal documentaries, music videos, and reimagined home movies about
demolition derbys, ghost hunts, and melancholy polar bears.
Jason Robinson is a filmmaker and new media artist who makes single-channel experimental videos, animated gifs, and live performances. He is an assistant professor of Digital Art at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.
Nuts!
August 5th – Asheville Art Museum
Inventive and wildly fun, NUTS! recounts the unbelievable true story of John Romulus Brinkley, a Kansas doctor who in 1917 discovered that he could cure impotence by transplanting goat testicles into men. From there, the story only gets more bizarre.
Mixing hand-drawn animated reenactments, interviews, archival footage, and a very unreliable narrator, NUTS! traces Brinkley’s rise from poverty and obscurity to the heights of celebrity, wealth, and influence. Along the way, he transplants thousands of goat testicles, amasses an enormous fortune, is (sort of) elected Governor of Kansas, invents junk mail and the infomercial, builds the world’s most powerful radio station, and generally annoys the heck out of the establishment.
Filmmaker Penny Lane (OUR NIXON) has skillfully borrowed a page from her subject – charming viewers into believing the unbelievable, building their trust and excitement, until the final chapter bares the painful truth and reveals the doctor for what he truly was. NUTS! reminds us that our love of (and need for) compelling narratives is exactly what makes us so endlessly susceptible to being conned.
FREE and open to the public!
No Home Movie
July 21st – Grail Moviehouse
“At the center of Chantal Akerman’s enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother’s life and their own intense connection to each other. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” —New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Fierce Flix Film Premiere
July 1st – Grail Moviehouse
World Premiere for the Fierce Flix music videos!
Fierce Flix is a summer camp for girls and gender minorities ages 8-16. Over the course of a week, campers will work in groups to write, direct, shoot, and edit music videos for the bands at Girls Rock Asheville! Each day, campers will attend video shoots, filmmaking instruction, workshops, and a mini-screening and Q&A with a female filmmaker. Throughout the week, campers are encouraged to work together, support each other, and foster one another’s unique creative abilities through positive reinforcement.
Glitter Bomb: The Fierce Films of Kelly Gallagher
June 29th – Firestorm
Nothing says fight or f-off better than glitter. Experimental animator and filmmaker Kelly Gallagher will screen short works and offer a Q&A!
Kelly Gallagher’s collage animations engage topics ranging from stories of personal histories, to feminist calls to arm, to legacies of radical resistance against white supremacy. After completing her MFA in Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa this past spring, Gallagher currently teaches courses in media arts at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
We’ve had such a great summer, and can’t wait to share with you our plans for this fall!!!
xo,
mechanical eye
Mechanical Eye Microcinema 