Northwest Film Forum

Berkeley underground filmmaker Antero Alli's "The Invisible Forest" follows a sleep-deprived theatre director who undergoes hypnotic regression to stop a reoccurring nightmare that began in the forest where his troupe attempted to enact Antonin Artaud's magic theatre of ghosts, gods and spirits. Inspired by the radical visions of the French Surrealist playwright, Alli also borrows from Rimbaud's poetics for the "deliberate disorientation of the senses" to achieve a series of altered states. In the director's own words, "if cinema was a drug, some movies act on us like tranquilizers and others jack us up like triple espressos. I see The Invisible Forest as a 100% organic, user-friendly hallucinogen".