The student-run festival features a number of selections with state connections
The Milwaukee Underground Film Festival runs this Thurs through Sun over eight programs and four locations (Fine Arts Cinema, Union Cinema, Woodland Pattern Book Center and Kenilworth Square East). The student-run festival has achieved acclaim over the years for its voracious approach to non-linear and experimental storytelling, and such is true in this year’s lineup, which crams tons of quality short films (in addition to flying in artist Alee Peoples from Los Angeles).
Among the selections are more than a few picks from Wisconsin. UW-Milwaukee, which sponsors the event, has a deep dossier to pull from through its Peck School of the Arts as many of this year’s projects come from alumni, graduate students and lecturers. MUFF operates on a purely non-profit basis — and festival organizers have turned to crowdfunding in the past to keep things afloat — so if you’re in the area this weekend, go out and support a good thing.
Here are a handful of pieces worth seeing to help on that front:
Sat (4:00p — Woodland Pattern Book Center)
Beneath a Glass Floor Lobby
Lisa Danker (now an associate film professor in Florida) takes the state to task over construction developments in Miami that threaten historically relevant sites. Turning her indictment onto Malaysian conglomerate Genting Group, Danker shoots on Super 8 for a found footage aesthetic. Given that Genting’s initial proposal in 2011 has since stalled out, the vintage format only adds to the stagnant feeling.
Picture Start
With its tactile stop-motion animation, Hannah White’s Picture Start is aces on aesthetics alone, reminiscent of the browned-out artwork of Lane Smith. As its patron sits down alone at the cinema to take in a classic, a disembodied voice begins musing on the “ability to see,” which Picture Start uses as a launchpad for a morose look at perception — with a little help from Ingrid Bergman.
Sun (3:00p — Kenilworth Square East, Rm 408)
Frida Was Here
Self-effacing for a few laughs, Renato Umali’s travelogue is brutally honest about its search for an alleged stash of Frida Kahlo keepsakes, which includes the director’s difficulties remembering anything outside of Spanish cognates. Set in San Miguel de Allende, Frida Was Here pokes and prods at the question of authenticity. It works as both a companion piece to Umali’s Diaries From Guatemala and as a larger part of this year’s festival and a continuing theme of authenticity and reality.
WorldBuilding
Janelle VanderKelen uses fuzzy, luminous nature photography and then plays a mash of chopped up atmospheric audio and half-whispers over it. And then the lights go out. For a while. Through nothing but darkness and an inviting delivery, WordlBuilding‘s narration plays its audience’s permission to do — and not to do.
Sun (7:00p — Kenilworth Square East, Rm 408)
A Boy and His Guns
Among the best-looking in this year’s selections, Sean Kafer’s black-and-white piece is also wound up, with a taut approach editing that makes the shenanigans of its titular “boy” seem not so innocent at times. Contradicting the ineffable tension is a bouncing, off-kilter soundtrack and a setting that feels straight out of 50s Americana.
Attendees at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival will also recall Synthase (Fri at 7:00p), which Grant Phipps found to “evoke the biological elements and time-lapse photography in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color” and John Powers’s The House You Were Born In (Sun at 3:00p).
- The Milwaukee Underground Film Festival runs Thurs, Apr 28 through Sun, May 1. You can see all participating locations as well as the full lineup at film-milwaukee.org