Northwest Film Forum

Your typical movie aims to engage your emotions through storytelling in such a way that the filmmaking becomes invisible. Alternate Cinema is different. Incorporating experimental and avant-garde elements, these films engage you on an intellectual as well as emotional level; often by making you aware that you’re watching a film. Czech director Ivo Trajkov achieves this effect by making his 8mm feature MOVIE, OR AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF AUTEUR FULM MAKING both a road movie and an independent filmmaker's manual of advice. Other filmmakers hold their shots for long periods of time, shifting your attention from story to shot composition and encouraging you to examine motion pictures as though they were paintings, as in MILKY WAY or CASTING A GLANCE. Because themes and stories aren't spoon-fed, audiences must work to decipher a thru-line, such as the colonial self-criticism found in EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY or the city symphony of human foibles that is YOU, THE LIVING. Then there's the alternate documentaries like Marie Losier's unconventional short films about experimental artists, Hartmut Bitomsky's philosophical essay about life, death, and tiny particles, DUST, and Alina Marazzi's exquisitely edited archival films for the post-feminist WE WANT ROSES TOO. Heinz Emigholz's chronological look at modernist buildings of Adolf Loos, is given without commentary and the architecture itself becomes autobiography, in LOOS ORNAMENTAL. This year we have all this and shorts, too! We invite all adventurous filmgoers to take a look at the movies that exist in the realm of Alternate Cinema.