Max and the Freaks

A chronicle of the lives of a couple and the gradual dissolution of their relationship.

With enough force, will, and determination, rivers can flow in reverse. But the truth of the water is revealed where it meets the sky. This trance-inducing film was produced in a collaboration with Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble; a modular feature film designed to be in conversation with seven works by some of America’s greatest living composers.

Six million tons, suspended by the slightest gesture. Mother of the World presents a series of brief vignettes of Cairo just prior to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. These fragmented scenes choreograph class structure and foreign influence into an intimate, poetic view of a nation about to change.

GIRI CHIT tells a tale of the subtle trace of irreconcilable worlds. A worker driving a mobile sweeper in hypnotic circles across an already immaculate surface. The high drama of cosplay aficionados clamoring to be seen. A cast of thousands toiling hundreds of feet above the street. Giri translates as ‘duty’ in Japanese, but the concept is in fact far more complicated. Giri is a sort of interpersonal political capital that informs careers, family relations, and much more. Its presence and flow is palpable in Japan, where this film was shot. A “giri chit” then may be a hypothetical voucher for this intangible flow (with a tip of the cap to Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”). Selected Screenings and Awards: DaVinci Film Festival (Best Experimental Film), Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Dallas Videofest, ICDOCS Film Festival, NewFilmmakers at Anthology Film Archives, Oxford Film Festival, Director’s Lounge Berlin

When illegal card dealer and recovering heroin addict Frankie Machine gets out of prison, he decides to straighten up. Armed with nothing but an old drum set, Frankie tries to get honest work as a drummer. But when his former employer and his old drug dealer re-enter his life, Frankie finds it hard to stay clean and eventually finds himself succumbing to his old habits.

An endearing light comedy about a woman who spontaneously becomes a resident of Venice after her family left her behind. While enjoying the wonderful people she meets she achieves a new life and the first time independent of her family.

Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.

Record label manager and producer Manfred Eicher established the record label ECM in 1969. He has been a key promoter of European - and Norwegian - jazz.

From the sound of mountains and endless expanses, to the heavy pulse of the big city. Norwegian jazz is loved by fans all over the world. How did small Norway become a big jazz country?

In a seemingly easy theatre exercise, Rebeca, a young Roma woman, student at an elite acting school, is pushed to confront her biggest fear.

Music by Austin Cesear, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.

Music By Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Super 8mm Film By Paul Clipson.

Documentary short showcasing the genius of jazz greats Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Cozy Cole, and Milt Hinton, among others.

Latest installment from the on-going collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson & musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Paul's Super8 films, shot entirely in New York City, channel the blissed out states of color drenched psychadellia explored by Brakage as well as lovely black and white still life's that reminisce on Ozu's 'pillow shots' & Chantel Akermans monumental portrait of Pre-Giuliani New York 'Letters Home'. Jefre's music is culled from the same sessions that launched his 2007 release on Students Of Decay 'Shinning Skull Breath', (the two share a track in common). Billowy clouds of distorted guitar expand out into long passages of muffled static and fuzzed out melody.

"Ephemeris" (2011) is a conversation of image and sound, between filmmaker Paul Clipson and electronic musician Aki Onda, rendered as if from a fragmented journey of landscapes and memories. Clipson and Onda each investigate very personal, intuitive spaces, through their favored technologies of Super 8mm film and cassette Walkman. Both artists base a significant emphasis of their work on performance environments, where their visual and sonic field recordings interact to create sensory collages born out of the subjective impressions of the audience.

Super 8mm, 21 min., color and b&w, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Snow falls. Eyes gaze out the window, crossing with the moon, while another eye, capturing that gaze, trembles. At the crossroads of glances that can never meet, the film moves on its own. The camera faces the window, and the projector casts its light onto the screen. Between misaligned eyes and light, we imagine a scene we can never truly see.

Harlem's legendary Cotton Club becomes a hotbed of passion and violence as the lives and loves of entertainers and gangsters collide.

Atmospheric Offense is an interpretation of Ida Lupino’s 1953 Noir Thriller The Hitch-Hiker that explores how narrative both remains and disappears when exposed to avant-garde techniques, which include removing dialogue, jarring and destructive ellipses, the creation of loops to focus on certain elements, reimagining of time, exaggeration of a certain sinister aesthetic, and a push toward a certain dream like quality. Narrative remains, but with a bastardized and disoriented aftereffect, which transforms it into another way of experiencing it. The spree killings of Billy Cook (portrayed in Lupina’s film by the actor William Talman, and renamed Emmett Myers) are looked at more as a moment in time that begins and ends with vague qualities much like a dream, or an experience of weather in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.

35mm of collaged film material reading like a diary without linear thought or narrative. A hodgepodge of photographic images spliced and taped with ecstatic handmade explosions of colour and texture. A fragmentary experience that revels in the material and provides an opaque and impenetrable portrait of the maker.