Joel Gilman

A bemused time-traveling librarian named Flux from the serenity of 2023 to the chaos of Seattle in 1999, where he uncovers video footage from a riot that triggered the city's collapse. Society's obsession with communications technology has created the near-extinction of conversation. People communicate via e-mail and videofax; the film's few face-to-face encounters have a sourish, sitcom-type sting.

Set in Port Townsend, San Francisco, and the "bardo terrains of the soul realm," this promising 70-minute debut feature (shot in Hi-8 and 3/4" video and Super 8 film) is a visionary exploration of an elderly bedridden man's interior journey toward death and beyond. It's also a sometimes humorous, sometimes heartrending portrayal of his family's changing perceptions of the process of death. It follows the final day in the life of an elderly patriarch who has lapsed into an intermittent coma. As he dies, his son returns home to visit the family, where he unexpectedly participates in an ancient ritual of ancestral origins.