November 17, Thursday, 7:30PM, 2005
Four Women Artists:
Nina Yuen, Hope Tucker, Julia Haslett, Arshia Haq

Suitcase Devil Baby Dress 9 min, video, 2003
Director: Nina Yuen

Dueling interpretations attempt to illuminate a series of cryptic situations.

Hurt & Save 22min, video, 2001
Director: Julia Haslett

An alternately serious and bizarre portrait of an adjustable bed salesman in rural England. Hurt & Save follows Tom Haslett into the privacy of people’s homes where he demonstrates his product’s “healing” qualities to customers who -- whether lonely, eccentric, or simply depressed -- are all eager to talk, if not to buy. The film screened at, among others, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, IFP Buzz Cuts by Sundance Channel, and, most recently, The Tank in NYC.

Massachusetts native Julia Haslett got her start at Somerville Community Access Television and her first film/tv job at WGBH-Boston. Her documentary shorts Hurt & Save (2001) and Flooded (2003) have screened at numerous festivals, including Cinematexas, Full Frame, and the Athens Intl Film Festival. Julia is producer/director of the highly-acclaimed Worlds Apart (2003) series – four short films about cultural conflicts over medical treatment. Now a resident of New York City, she is currently at work on a film about the French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil. Educated at Swarthmore College and Boston University, Julia was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony earlier this year.

The Obituary Project 4 selections from the series 13min, video, 2000-2005
Director: Hope Tucker In Person!

Bessie Cohen, Survivor of 1911 Shirtwaist Fire 3 minutes, video, 2000	Lolo Ferrari 1.5 minutes, video, 2001

Big Star
3 minutes, digital video, color, sound, 2003

Noel
5 minutes, digital video, color, sound, 2005

An obituary whittles one's social contribution down to its barest form,so that the last ninety years of a life can be eclipsed by an escape from a burning building. An exploited French porn star with a large but anonymous fan base might have no obituary at all, garnering only an AP wire report. Beyond the newspaper obituary page, a songwriter's identity remains as obscure as his motives for penning a popular holiday standard.

The Obituary Project is an ongoing film and video project, with some fifteen pieces completed to date. These explore the obit as social construction and biography, fiction and non-fiction. The works I craft make no pretence to being direct translations of factual life stories. They are elegies, meditations, and memorials. Each is constructed after extensive research but explores only a particular facet of its subject. Sometimes the inspiration for a segment of The Obituary Project has been a particular person, sometimes the unacknowledged circumstances of that life, and sometimes the mystique they've left behind in death. The project rearranges the contours of biography, to reclaim or expand a neglected identity, by acknowledging the traits and attributes by which we learn to recognize and which become identifying markers of authentic life. In this way, I ask my audience to consider the fabricated nature of biography and identity through my own admittedly incomplete fabrications.

(Re)collection 20min, video, 2005
Director: Arshia Haq

(Re)collection contrasts three seemingly unrelated spaces: the laboratory of an entomologist; an antiquated movable-type press whose operator expresses nostalgia for his dying native language, Urdu; and, finally, the space occupied by other people's photographs whose subjects are impossible for strangers to identify. Haq's investigation bridges the empirical language of scientific research and the subjectivity of personal reflection. - Susan Oxtoby