From Beirut to ... those who love us (6 minutes, video, 2006)
This video letter was made on July 21, 2006 at the studios of Beirut DC, a film and cinema collective which runs the yearly Ayam Beirut Al Cinema'iya Film Festival. This video letter was produced in collaboration with Samidoun, a grassroots gathering of various organizations and individuals who were involved in relief and media efforts from the first day of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. It was also broadcast at the Biennial of Arab Cinema, organized by the Arab World Institute in Paris. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5407.shtml
Happy Are The Happy (your best joke, please) (17min., 16mm, b x w, sound)
director: Sarah Jane Lapp and Jenny Perlin
A journey into humor guided by the survivor of not-so-funny lives.
Czech Republic/USA 1999 Czech with English subtitles, 17min., 16mm, b x w, sound
“Give us your best joke…” With this questions Sarah Jane Lapp and Jenny Perlin explore the way humor redeems the most extreme form of suffering. Interviewing Holocaust survivors, survivors of the Sarajevo siege, and Roman residents of Prague, Lapp and Perlin explore the social mechanisms for survival in the face of racism, war, and death. Formally the film is neither a documentary, essay, or story, but uses all of these forms to get to its subject. The film hauntingly reconstructs the feeling of remembrance, and how it plays itself out in everyday life. (Dan Eisenberg, Wounds & Visions, Up-and-Coming Film Festival Hannover Catalogue 1999)
For all the blockbuster and indie filmmakers out there today, there are few who films are as astonishing as those of the still-emerging Sarah Jane Lapp, a Fulbright scholar who has received international recognition for her works. What sets Lapp’s films apart is that she artfully blends documentary and creative techniques, merging “truth” with the figuratively imagined. Her work gives off a palpable sense of thoughtful politics and aesthetics. In the touching and richly imagistic Happy are the Happy (Your best joke, please), Lapp and co-filmmaker Jenny Perlin investigate how humor can build bridges between those who have witnessed ethnic persecution…(Summi Kaipa, San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 25, 2000)
Sarah Jane Lapp's 16mm and 35mm films have shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world and have won numerous awards. She has been the recipient of a Jerome Foundation New York Media Grant, a Fulbright scholarship, two MacDowell Colony residencies, and several Rockefeller nominations. Her fine art works are featured in museums, corporate and private collections, and the daily Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also trained at Studio Bratri v Triku and at FAMU in Prague. She is currently making a new animation, "Chronicles of a Professional Eulogist" which bears no relation to her last Mark Dresser collaboration, "Chronicles of an Asthmatic Stripper."
Jenny Perlin's 16mm films, videos, and drawings work with and against the documentary tradition, incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history.
Perlin's films and installations have been shown in the U.S. and internationally and are owned by several public and private collections. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants. Her work is represented by represented by Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam. Perlin received a B.A. from Brown University, received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. She currently teaches at Mount Holyoke and the Five Colleges and divides her time between Massachusetts and New York.
The Haunted Camera (30 minutes, 16mm, 2006) 
director: Nancy Andrews
The Haunted Camera (16mm film, B&W, 30 minutes, 2006, written, directed, cinematography, editing, puppets and animation by Nancy Andrews, music by John Cooper) This is the final installment in the Ima Plume trilogy. An homage to film noir, it explores Ima Plume’s investigation of her own death. Ima, Public Illustrator, grapples with trying to express things that might not be seen or drawn including: spirits, electronic voice phenomena and studies of animal locomotion. The film combines chalk and drawn animation, puppetry and live action. It is both fiction and documentary. Inspiration for the content and style is taken from pioneers of film, vaudeville, photography and spiritualism.
South of Ten (10 minutes 16mm, 2006)
director: Liza Johnson
A girl flees a makeshift tent city. A man finds a trombone. A worker watches the ocean from under a moving house, while its owner gazes at the view from her shifting living room. In ten very short stories, residents of the destroyed Mississippi Gulf Coast act out atmospheric scenes of everyday life and the relentlessness of labor in their extreme landscape.
For South of Ten, I worked with residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to evoke the tone and feeling of living among the ruins left by Hurricane Katrina. I wrote scenarios based on discussions with area participants, and then members of the community acted out very small scenes from everyday life.
By January 2006, when I shot the film, many residents of the Gulf Coast had already been interviewed by TV crews, and most had watched a lot of coverage of nearby New Orleans. People had a strongly internalized sense of the interview conventions they were supposed to perform in order to be a televised “hurricane victim.” For me it was important to think about other ways that residents could testify to their experiences, and to show the ways that people were quietly resisting the ruination around them, even with very few resources.
In the time since we shot the film, cast members have let me know that some small improvements have happened in the area, but that the work is incredibly slow, and that things will never be the same.
Director bio:
Liza Johnson is a filmmaker and writer. Her narrative shorts and experimental videos have screened in Berlin, Rotterdam, and many other international festivals and fine arts venues. Her video installations have been shown in Artists Space in New York, the ICA in Philadelphia, Cineboords in Rotterdam, and Mass MOCA and WCMA in Massachusetts. She is currently at work on a feature film, Short Walk to Everything. She is Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.
