Thanks to the Walker, Hunger will be playing for an extended run in one of the few Twin Cities movie theaters that doesn’t serve popcorn. That observation sounds glib, I’m sure, particularly in light of the film’s grave subject — the slow and painful death, by self-imposed starvation, of imprisoned Irish nationalist Bobby Sands, who died in 1981 after 66 days in protest of the British government. But it…

We had a incredible couple days with Ramin Bahrani here at the Walker and managed to have a quick snapshot taken outside our Cinema. Thanks to all that were able to come out to the screenings and partake in the Master Class on Friday afternoon.

Before youtube, before MTV, music videos were shown for half an hour a few nights a week. The innovative visual music started by Oskar Fischinger in Germany in the twenties translated into experimental films from Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger, and to more mainstream music films, (From A Hard Days Night, to Rocky Horror, The Who’s rock opera Tommy and beyond). Finally, in the seventies the pop promo…

In a meaty, 5,000-word feature in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, critic A.O. Scott brought together a number of recent American independent films under the rubric “neo-neo realism,” proposing that they might serve as an answer to the question that “seems to arise almost automatically in times of crisis” – that is, “What kind of movies do we need now?” Besides provoking an immediate and rather, uh…

Astra Taylor, Canadian director of Žižek!has conquered and surpassed the traditional aesthetic realm of documentary filmmaking, by moving past the talking head. Her new film, Examined Life takes eight philosophers to the streets, placing them in non-traditional settings (Slavoj Žižek, for example, talks about the fascism of ecology in the midst of a garbage dump). Needless to say, it’s pretty interesting…

“I feel like I’m a woman with vision — in 3D,” says my fully dimensioned friend Melissa Butts, co-director of 3D Sunand principal force behind the Minneapolis-based Melrae Pictures. “Where I don’t consider myself a woman with vision is in the sense of being a female director,” she continues. “I happened to co-direct this film [with Barry Kimm]. Will I direct other films? Not necessarily. It’s not my passion…

In an attempt to conjure up one word to describe So Yong Kim’s second film, Treeless Mountain, I immediately came up with melancholic. The story, based loosely on So Yong Kim’s childhood, revolves around two children, Jin and Bin, who in essence are abandoned by their mother when she places them in temporary holding with their aunt, referred to as Big Aunt.  With the summer ending and their mother still…

In November of 2004, Dargis wrote a piece following his opening at the Rosamund Felsen gallery in California.The article, titled In the Studios’ Shadow, An Avant-Garde Eye, is a pointed essay that juxtaposes his “studio life” with his personal career. Dotingly referring to him as a “filmmaker who has brushed conceptual elbows with such radically different personalities as the avant-garde pioneer Maya…

The second installation of Expanding the Frame: Tribute to Experimentation rapidly approaches – next Thursday, February 12, 2008. Unlike Bruce McClure’s live Projection Performance, the second evening of Experimentation (also a Target free Thursday) focuses on the works of Bruce Conner, through a screening of his work and conversation between Film/Video curator Sheryl Mousley and alum Walker curator…