Country:United States of America

Director:George Romero

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Romero trenchantly captures the now too familiar tone and rhetoric of world panic. The Dead have apparently conquered the earth, leaving just small bands of isolated people strategically hidden. One community made up of both scientific and military personnel, hiding in a bunker, tries to get in contact with other survivors of the zombie infestation, but find themselves quite alone in this new world.

Country:United States of America

Director:George Romero

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Romero’s penchant for outlandish satire becomes more pronounced while the acuity of his social commentary is undiminished. TV station workers Stephen and Francine decide to run as the urban situation worsens and, after meeting Roger and Peter (two special policemen ordered to relocate survivors into rescue stations), steal a helicopter and fly west in an attempt to find a safe place. They find paradise in the form of a deserted mega-mall shopping center where they hole up and discover that the dead surely delight in doing what they did most while alive: go shopping!

Country:United States of America

Director:George Romero

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

The dead come back to life and eat the living. This was the premise for a simple low budget film independently produced in far-from-Hollywood Pittsburgh, Pa. by a resourceful man named George Romero.

Country:South Africa, United States of America

Director:Lionel Rogosin

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Lionel Rogosin covertly managed an accurate portrayal of township life under apartheid. Written by Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane and starring many of the brightest black urban stars of the fifties, this film broke new ground in the way it showed African urban identity and the hardships of township life in the magical place known as Sophiatown. Rogosin had entered South Africa and shot this film under false pretences while hounded by strict apartheid laws. Sophiatown was destroyed by the government in 1957.

Country:United States of America, Chile

Director:Juan Downey

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Juan Downey (1940 - 1993) was a pioneer video artist who was born in Santiago, Chile. He is best known for his video work that is an eclectic voyage into political discourse, the history of art, ideas, personal discovery and self-reflection. Downey rediscovered a form of moving discourse that combined a multicultural deconstructivist investigation of language with his own deep understanding of color, form, shape and process. In this work Downey combines anthropology with art history to observe the way we as people are engaged in the process of seeing.

Country:United States of America, Venezuela

Director:Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Timothy Asch contributed one of the most dynamic and reflexive series of anthropologically based films when working with Napoleon Chagnon and the Yannamami people of the Orinookoo River region of Venezuela. What is important is how Asch incorporates himself into the analytic basis of the film and how he frames the incidents that occur. Despite their brevity, the films are truly startling and are not soon forgotten. Timothy Asch (1932 -1994), was a noted anthropologist, photographer, and ethnographic filmmaker.

Country:United States of America, Haiti

Director:Maya Deren

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Maya Deren matriarch of the american Avant-Garde cinema, spent the last decade of her life pondering the enormous amount of footage she had made of voodoo rituals in Haïti, the film of which remained unfinished at her death. The film was completed by her surviving husband, composer Teiji Ito, after some twenty years of contemplation of the footage. The footage itself is mesmerizing, powerful and revelatory, combining so much of what we associate with Deren’s experimental cinema with an astonishing actuality.

Country:United States of America

Director:Zora Neale Hurston

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.  While she was studying anthropology at Barnard College, she conducted ethnographic research under her advisor, the noted anthropologist Franz Boas. This led her to undertake an ambitious field work project that would combine cinema and antrhopology just as fellow student Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were developing the nascent theories of Visual Anthropology.

Country:United States of America

Director:Manthia Diawara and Ngugi Wa Thiongo

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

This rich documentary follows the legendary Senagalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane from the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso back to the streets of Dakar and his Galle Ceddo home at Yoff, overlooking the sea. Revisiting several locations of his films, Sembene Ousmane reminisces about his career and discusses his craft.

Country:United States of America

Director:Walt Disney

Program:Parallel Youth

Summary:

Walt Disney’s very first films were conceived as a combination of live action and animation which was inspired by Through the Looking Glass. Disney had originally planned to film the book itself but as that project was delayed he commenced with this ongoing series of shorts which, once begun, occupied him for the next several years.