ARTHOUSE FILM NEWS - Cosmic Disco Detective Rene at Facets, Chicago 11/29/23

Went to DC for a Positive Force benefit tonight. Soccer Team & The Evens played. $s from the show was to benefit The Washington Free Clinic . Got to hang out with Mark Andersen , Chad Clark (of Beauty Pill fame) & say hello to a person (dang, i do not remember her name, she had a nice jacket, a cool looking camera & a nice smile) who came to the 11/4 Date Number One screening/We Are Family benefit (& also finally delivered the $s raised at that event to Mark A. of We Are Family), & said hello to Ian MacKaye . It is nice to live in a city where a lot of the creative & activist people I dig are very accessible - or at least I can talk to them at shows. The Evens sounded a lot better than when I first heard/saw them live at the same church (St. Stephen's (sp?) at 16th & Newton, NW DC) a year or two ago. The sound was a lot more fuller & felt more confident. The two member band sounded like a four member or three member band - a lot fuller sound than a d

Had lunch with my mom & sister today - to celebrate my recent birthday. Mom told me that when I was born in Sri Lanka in the early 1970's the doctors said I would only live for 5 days because I had yellow fever. But a nurse told her to ignore the doctors & breastfeed her new baby & that it would survive. Thanks nurse! :) So obviously I did not die from yellow fever. Very cool. There is a hospital, a military hospital here in the DC area & it is called Walter Reed. According to Don, my boss/the owner of the bookstore, Walter Reed was a military doctor who figured out how to treat yellow fever. Reed figured out his yellow fever treatment when the Panama Canal was being built. Go Walter Reed! Good job. Childbirth in 1970's Sri Lanka sounded like very tough work. Mom said she was 22, knew very little about child birth, & that there were no drugs to numb the pain - & that giving birth to me was very painful. Apparently I came out with the umbilical cord wrapp

A lot of people are going to be making movies now that movie making is affordable, actually a lot of people are already making movies & of course a lot have already made movies in the past 100+ years. But it still costs a lot of money (& it is a lot of work) to distribute the finished movies theatrically. It costs less money or a far less amount of money in some cases to place a movie on DVD & make it available to customers all over the country - that's if you can convince various retailers to carry your DVD. Filmmakers can however stream their movies through a internet VOD (video-on-demand) service such as GreenCine VOD (note: according to GreenCine "for the moment, most Macs are not supported" by them so mostly only PCs can be used for their video-on-demand service, for now) or many other companies that offer the VOD service & get the film to the consumer's computer/to the consumers "hands" for a lower cost - both to the filmmaker & the

Apparently soon humans won't be the only highly intelligent beings who are unstable. From Renew Media 's website: "Companion Projects. A collection of robots with complicated psychological states, such as anxiety or other neuroses, in an on-going exploration of how to facilitate empathic communication between machines and humans. The machines respond to human touch in provocatively unstable ways, presenting their human companions with emotional dilemmas." Here's the link . Provocatively unstable robots are the best! - Sujewa

Then I guess Lynch is no stranger to self-distribution. Here is the line from the Time article re: Inland Empire & Lynch self-distributing it: "...says Lynch, who released his first film, Eraserhead, himself in 1977." Here's the URL to the article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568472,00.html Exactly 30 years later & gettin' back to the roots! - Sujewa

This week is my birthday week. My best accomplishment of the previous personal year, my 33rd year, was completing Date Number One & doing 12 screenings of the movie in 5 cities. In the new year I want to do many times that many screenings & also complete some new features. Off to prep for the new year & celebrate the birthday, so here are some Date Number One related images until I get back to bloggin' in a few days. The Date Number One DVD will be available very soon - w/in this month. A very special thanks to everyone who made the previous year a most awesome one. - Sujewa

James Spooner is the director & as far as I know the distributor or one of the distributors of the doc Afro-Punk. Now it seems like he is near completion on his new movie, this one is fiction. Here is the MySpace page for White Lies, Black Sheep . And here is the description of the story & the film from that same page: " A.J.'s real name is Ajamu Talib. His dislike for his African name is the least of his problems, still it says a lot about him. Brooklyn born and bred yet outcast by his peers, his only escape was music. A.J. found freedom in rock n roll. Tight clothes, straightened hair, popular with girls and partying every night, he is fully entrenched, in the debaucherous New York rock n roll scene. For once he feels like everyone else. Well almost. He begins to find that his chosen community, the white rock world, only seems to run smoothly for white rockers. A series of events force him to recognize his friends both exotify him and are in denial of his blackness.

Check it out here , entertaining - if you are at all into DC punk music. The last piece of music (with lines "you're my miss washington, dc") you'll hear on that YouTube piece is from The Nation of Ulysses - one of the best/most entertaining DC punk bands of all time & one of my favorite - the 1st punk band (or post-punk/noise band) that I really liked. I think that line is from a song on their '92 album Plays Pretty for Baby . Some of the elements of the DC punk scene (DIY production & distribution, community, etc.) are very influential in how I am going about creating a DIY film production & distribution business. Also, this blog and its habit of sharing production & distribution info. mirrors DC musicians sharing music making info (Simple Machines, a local punk/indie label, published a guide to releasing music). - Sujewa PS: Nation of Ulysses : Plays Pretty for Baby -->Ian Svenonius - vocals Steve Kroner - guitar Tim Green - guitar Steve Gam

Yup, a self-distribution sub culture has definitely formed in the indie filmmaking scene. This year was a pretty big year for us . This blog, also Indie Features (ex-Indie Features 06), and Lance Weiler's The Workbook Project , indieWIRE (specially indieLOOP ) & GreenCine Daily blog, Hollywood Is Talking blog , & sometimes Filmmaker Magazine blog , DV Guru , The Chutry Experiment are some of the places on the web to learn more about/keep up with this latest development in indie film. Individual filmmakers have self-distributed in the past, focusing for the most part on their own projects, but this year several filmmakers got into self-distribution and most of us know each other & keep in touch from time to time & also, at times, help each other out. The web/e-mail has been very useful in this community coming into existence. Looking forward to seeing where we take things in '07. I see several layers in the indie filmmaking scene right now: 1) indie filmmakers

Screen Door Film is a screening series in Austin, TX. Maybe worth checking out, here's the link . You might be able to get your film screened in Austin through Screen Door, which will give you an excuse to take a trip to that cool Texas town. And there is no submission fee for sending them your film, which is very helpful to broke indie filmmakers :)

Check it out here ! Dogme 95 is like so 90's man, but it is still very relevant, quite possibly the most important development in low budget & independent filmmaking since the French New Wave.

I am slowly walking towards having Date Number One on DVD (this month! it'll be a December miracle! :), & so I am looking at places to sell the DVD - Amazon.com is definitely a place I want to get my DVD in to. So I just did a little bit of research on how a DIY filmmaker & ultra low budget self-distributor such as myself can get my DVD on Amazon. Looks like there are three options: 1) "ALL AMAZON" (my term) : CustomFlix - Amazon's wholly owned subsidiary CustomFlix makes copies of the flick, Amzaon lists the DVDs on their site & mails 'em out to customers, costs: unknown to me at this point, more research is necessary, 2) " YOU & AMAZON": Advantage - you make the DVD & Amazon stocks a few & lists the titles on their site & fulfills orders & you get to keep up on the transactions on a regular basis & replenish DVDs as they sell 'em, costs: $29.95 a year & 55% commission, there maybe other costs, more rese

This seems to be the official website for David Lynch's Inland Empire. Hopefully everyone who is trying to find out when & if the flick will get to their creepy suburbs or logging towns or tawdry entertainment capitals can find the answers there . Good luck! The movie is coming to DC in January 07, I'm gonna be there with a big grin on my face. With Lynch embracing film ART & digital production & self-distribution, the movies are gonna be alright in this new century I think.

And that's no small feat, the main theater at DC's Avalon (Avalon 1) - I assume the screening was held there - holds over 400 people. I spoke with the film's director Doug Block briefly on the phone a few minutes ago (had I known earlier that he would be down here for a few hours for the screening & Q & A, we could have hung out. next time). Congrats Doug & 51 Birch Street ! Perhaps this will mean more DC screenings of the film.

I've been doing some reading on the topic of philosophy vs. religion last night & today, and here is a link to an interesting doc I found. Here is a segment from that article , re: the difference between religion and philosophy: " To begin with, of the two only religions have rituals. In religions, there are ceremonies for important life events (birth, death, marriage, etc.) and for important times of the year (days commemorating spring, harvest, etc.). Philosophies, however, do not have their adherents engage in ritualistic actions. Students do not have to ritually wash their hands before studying Hegel and professors do not celebrate a “Utilitarian Day” every year." I am not religious but I do like the fact that religions constantly (or are at least said to be, or are supposed to/generally believed to be) deal with the BIG questions of life (the meaning - if any - of it, how to live, death, post-death scenarios, etc.) In that sense, philosophy maybe a good substitu