Lunchfilm

Lunchfilm Echo Park review

2009-06-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

Bad Lit gave the Lunchfilm menu a wonderful review:

http://www.badlit.com/?p=2651

Modern Painters

2009-06-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

A nice article in Modern Painters magazine, thanks Lyra:

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/31146/lunchtime/?page=1

more shows coming up

2009-04-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

April 11:
The Virginia Festival of Student Film
Charlottesville
vasfilm.com

April 22:
Austin Film Society

April 29 - May 2:
Marfa Film Festival
marfafilmfestival.org
screening three Lunchfilms:
$43.05 by Brent Green
$35.00 by Braden King
$41.32 by Lee Lynch/Naomi Uman

May 16:
Echo Park Film Center
Machine Gallery
Los Angeles

Lunchfilm San Francisco

2009-03-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

More Than a Snack: Lunchfilm

By Michael Fox
http://www.kqed.org/arts/profile/index.jsp?essid=14843

Mar 19, 2009

The short form used to be the Rodney Dangerfield of the film world -- it couldn't get no respect. Nowadays shorts programs are amazingly popular, a reflection less of chronic ADD than the dawning realization that no other night at the movies offers so much concentrated creativity.

The newest entry among the myriad touring programs (Ann Arbor, Microcinema, The Animation Show, etc.) is CineVegas programmer Mike Plante's Lunchfilm: Film Before Food. Like so many marvelous ideas, it began as a fluke. A filmmaker pal was short of dough, so Plante picked up the bill. The other fellow offered the standard make-good -- he'd get the check next time -- but Plante had a brainstorm: Pay back the "debt" by making a film for the same cost. The concept soon turned into regular commissions, now topping 50, with the programmer scratching out terms and themes over a midday bite with the designated filmmaker.

Shorts used to be viewed as the province of students and amateurs, the apprentices who weren't ready for prime time (that is, features). The Lunchfilm lineup boasts several mid-career experimental and nonfiction filmmakers, so I wasn't expecting half-baked dreck but a cascade of no-budget, handmade work akin to scrapbook art: low on materials and high on inspiration. There are a few pieces like that, notably Kelly Sears's mysterious, moody Jean, which revisits movie star Jean Seberg's dismal end through newspaper-style snippets of text laid over tarot illustrations.

But most of the films are so ambitious and accomplished that they defy any sense of constraints, financial or otherwise. The pick of the litter might be Braden King's intimate black-and-white Home Movie, co-written with and starring Mimi Visser as an exhausted, devoted Swedish mother who may be facing the loss of her young sons in a custody battle. Another highlight is local filmmaker Sam Green's wonderful and strangely moving Clear Glasses, which amplifies the connection he made with political activist-turned-fugitive-turned teacher Mark Rudd in the course of making his Oscar-nominated documentary The Weather Underground.

Another S.F. icon, George Kuchar, contributes one of his deceptively complex video travelogues, The Celluloid Cavalcade, a seemingly random compilation that begins in Atlanta (where he was touted with a couple of shows at Emory University) and ends up flitting around more familiar environs from the S.F. Art Institute (or Art Asylum, as Kuchar refers to his teaching home in his hilariously deadpan narration) to the S.F. International Film Festival's opening night party to a show by one-time local Martha Colburn at the New Nothing Cinema. Kuchar's charming, generous work may seem tossed off to the uninitiated, but there's an undercurrent of Hollywood sendup and monster-movie surrealism on the soundtrack that nudges his films into unexpected psychological territory.

The aforementioned Martha Colburn is represented by a stunning piece of cut-out animation, Myth Wars, that conflates religion, drug addiction and colonial history into a dizzying diorama. A young filmmaker named Mike Gibisser turns in an artful split-screen, black-and-white vignette of his grandmother entitled Springtime Wound Motor, a reference to the spring-loaded camera he employed. And Bobcat Goldthwaite utilizes old home movies -- his? who knows -- of children to satirize DVD commentary tracks, child stardom and sibling rivalries.

If it's not already clear, Lunchfilm: Film before Food draws on an incredible array of styles and genres, and (with only a couple of exceptions) is pure pleasure from start to finish. Jonathan Marlow of San Francisco Cinematheque saw the program at Sundance in January and asked Plante if a touring program was in the works; it turns out the two-and-a-quarter-hour S.F. show will be the first stop. Plante will be on hand, as well as Green and Kuchar, perhaps. Show some respect.

Lunchfilm screens Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts in San Francisco. For tickets and information http://www.ybca.org/

Lunchfilm on tour 2009

2009-01-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

Film Before Food: Lunchfilm '09 will be going on tour.

If you run a theater and would like to show the program,
give me a hollar: mike.plante AT cinevegas.com

so far for sure:
March 22; San Francisco Cinematheque
April 22; Austin Film Society

Lunchfilm: Sundance update

2009-01-13T18:49:00.000-08:00

So many Lunchfilms came in that there will be unique Lunch lineups during the festival, listed below. Any filmmaker in attendance will have their film in both of the first two screenings, and the third will have all the films in a 2-hr program.

$14.80 by Richard Bott, aka Anonymous, will loop before all shows.
shows at New Frontier on Main for free.

Program One
Monday, Jan 19, 6:15pm
78 min

films by:
Martha Colburn
Jim Finn
Mike Gibisser
Bobcat Goldthwait
Sam Green
Brent Green
Braden King
Lee Lynch and Naomi Uman
Nicholas McCarthy
Nicolas Provost
Ricardo Rivera
Sarah Soquel Morhaim
Jennifer Shainin and Randy Walker

Program Two
Tuesday, Jan 20th, noon
77 min

films by:
Tom Barndt
Sean Conway
David Fenster and David Nordstrom
Bobcat Goldthwait
Sam Green
George Kuchar
Jake Mahaffy
Nicholas McCarthy
Ricardo Rivera
Ben Russell
Kelly Sears
Sarah Soquel Morhaim

Friday, Jan 23rd, 6:15pm
all the lunchfilms will play

restaurant map

2009-01-11T22:25:00.000-08:00

where all the lunchfilms were commissioned:

eat at joe's

Lunchfilm Sundance

2008-12-09T12:49:00.001-08:00

Lunchfilm 2: Film Before Food will screen as a sidebar at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Mon, Jan 19th, 6:15pm
Tues, Jan 20th, noon (bring lunch!)
Fri, Jan 23rd, 6:15pm
at the New Frontier on Main
free admission

$65.13

2008-09-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

in production.
lunch eaten by Eric Dyer. Commissioned at Liberty Grill, Los Angeles. Cinemad visa #50.

Film must show how vision works.

lunchfilm

2008-08-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

A quick reminder what Lunchfilm is - it started by accident, a filmmaker didn't have cash on him at lunch because he puts everything he has into his films. I bought lunch. Instead of buying me a whole lunch in return, why not make a film for that money he would have spent instead? Film before food. We made some rules on a napkin, since we were talking about film during the lunch, things we liked or didn't like, so the napkin reflected what was on our minds.

All in the spirit of fun but it hopefully shows others how easy it is to help a filmmaker out. All of these artists would keep working regardless. But maybe it was an inspiration or extra bump for him/her to make something. Maybe it was a chance to try something different, per the rules. Or the challenge - you talk about what's right and wrong in film - go make one.

At the very least, a lunch funded a short film. You can probably afford lunch or a little more. So feed a filmmaker today.

$48.96

2008-08-06T19:10:00.000-07:00

made by Sarah Soquel Morhaim. (aka "All Day All Night", 2008, 3 minutes)

film must have:
a blind date.
the concept of "neighborhood".
Michigan.

Sarah Soquel Morhaim directs films and videos, writes, and takes photographs. She grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, graduated from Cornell University in 2003, lived and worked in New York City, now in Los Angeles. She's received awards for her photography from the National Foundation for Advancement of the Arts, and a music video she directed for the band "The Jealous Girlfriends" was voted 1st place in the iPod Flux Film Festival. Her photos, drawings, and video installations have been included in exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Paris, France. Her first narrative short film "Stars and Suns" recently screened at Palm Springs International, CineVegas, Maryland, and many others.

http://www.sarahsoquel.com

Commissioned at Flore, Los Angeles. Cinemad visa #49.

$25.45

2008-07-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

made by Jim Finn. (aka "Great Man and Cinema", 2009, 3 minutes)

film must:
tie the 1880s and 1980s together.
spend the budget on hair and makeup.

Jim Finn (b. St. Louis, 1968) uses humor and historical fiction to examine ideology, capitalism and revolutionary art practices. His work has screened at international festivals like Rotterdam, AFI and Edinburgh as well as museums and cinematheques such as the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Danish Film Institute and the Harvard Film Archive. His latest work is a trilogy of feature-length films looking at Marxist ideology. The first of these, Interkosmos, was called "a retro gust of communist utopianism" by the Village Voice and "charming and fantastic, so full of rare atmospheres" by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. His second feature La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo was put on the Village Voice's Top 10 Year in Experimental Film. And Variety called The Juche Idea "brilliant" and said all three films "upturn notions of documentary and fiction, propaganda thought, reality and restaging, and even what an 'experimental film' actually is."

commissioned at Defazio's, Troy, NY. Cinemad visa #48

$35.44

2008-07-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

made by Kelly Sears. (aka "Jean", 2008, 3 minutes).

film must:
have a fortune.
have an actress.
find something lost in an image.

Kelly Sears is an animator and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Hammer Museum, Sundance, Anthology Film Archives and in galleries and film festivals internationally. Sears' collage animations parse together collected media artifacts to reveal secret histories, forgotten tales, and possible moments embedded in the images around us.

www.kellysears.com

commissioned at Pho Cafe, Los Angeles, CA. Cinemad visa #47.

$43.19

2008-07-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

made by Tom Barndt. (aka "Offshore Bank", 2008, 4 minutes)

have one completely clean frame.
have someone Gallo-ish.
refer to a missed connection.

www.tomandsamara.com

commissioned at Fred's 62, Los Angeles, CA. Cinemad visa #46.

110 zloty

2008-06-30T11:43:00.001-07:00

in production.
lunch eaten by Azazel Jacobs. commissioned at Scandale Royal, Krakow, Poland. Cinemad visa #45.

film must be something you havent done before but have been carrying for a long time.

$24.00

2008-06-30T11:42:00.004-07:00

made by Sean Conway. (aka "Sloe Gin Nights", 2009, 2 minutes)

film must:
find the money I lost gambling tonite.

Sean Conway was born and raised on a council estate in Batley, a small mill town in West
Yorkshire. He attended Batley Parish C of E Primary School, Batley Grammar School and
Greenhead College Huddersfield, before going on to film school at Northumbria University,
where he graduated with a 1st Class BA Honours Degree. His short films Rocco Paris (2005), Rabbit Stories (2006, Special Mention of the Jury at Clermont-Ferrand), Alex and her Arse Truck ( 2007, a Cinema Extreme film) and Kings of London (2008) have played hundreds of film festivals worldwide and on British TV. Sean has had many poems and short stories published in various publications, notably Poems for the Retired Nihilist (Fortune Teller Press 2005) and Full Moon Empty Sportsbag (2006). Winter 2008 saw the release of his debut novella Son of Steve (published by Six Gallery Press) and he is currently working on his first novel The Science of the Beautiful.

www.seanconway.co.uk

commissioned at the Gold Coast, Las Vegas, NV. Cinemad visa #44.

$22.07

2008-06-30T11:42:00.003-07:00

made by Mike Gibisser. (aka "Springtime Wound Motor", 2009, 10 minutes)

film must:
relay the power of an audience.

Mike Gibisser is currently based in Chicago, working toward his master's in visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. FINALLY, LILLIAN AND DAN, his debut feature, premiered at CineVegas in 2008, and went on to screen at the Starz Denver, AFI, International Amsterdam, and Chicago International Film Festivals.

commissioned at 24 Seven Cafe, Las Vegas, NV. Cinemad visa #43.

$29.76

2008-06-30T11:42:00.001-07:00

made by Nicolas Provost. (aka "A Dyslexic Man Walks Into A Bra", 2009, 2 1/2 minutes)

film must:
be brighter than usual.
have piano medley.
contain a blooper.

Nicolas Provost (B) graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent, Belgium in 1994 but spent the last two years of his studies as an exchangestudent experimenting with video at the academy in Bergen, Norway. Provost spends the next 8 years in Oslo working as an illustrator, graphic designer and art director. In 1999 he starts making films again, art films, that quickly find their way to international film and visual art platforms. His work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience. His films ‘Papillon d’amour’, ‘Bataille’, ‘Oh Dear ‘ and ‘EXOTICORE’ have been awarded at prestigious festivals as among others The Sundance Film Festival. In 2003 Provost decides to make his first midlength fiction film EXOTICORE, a social critical film as a goodbye to Norway, and moves back to Belgium shortly after the shooting of the film. He is now developping a first featurefilmscript ‘The Invader’ based on the main character of EXOTICORE.

www.nicolasprovost.tk

commissioned at 24 Seven Cafe, Las Vegas, NV. Cinemad visa #42.

$29.51

2008-06-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

made by Nick McCarthy. (aka "Chinese Box", 2009, 10 minutes)

film must:
have a job search.
reference a desert.
one special effect.

Nicholas McCarthy is a writer and director who lives in Los Angeles.

Nick's work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, the CineVegas Film Festival, ScreamFest, the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, and many others. In L.A. Nick co-founded the Alpha 60 Film Collective in Echo Park, where he oversaw the production of hundreds of micro-cinema films.

In 2008, Nick's first photography series premiered at the Showcave Gallery in L.A., and has since moved to Mint Gallery in Atlanta.

When not being paid to write horror movies he stares out his window.

commissioned at Flore, Los Angeles, CA. Cinemad visa #41.

$35.77

2008-05-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

in production.
lunch eaten by Taika Waititi. commissioned at Newsroom, Los Angeles, CA. Cinemad visa #40.

film must:
be about noodles.
have kids cussing.

note: budget can be in another country's currency rate.

Lunchfilm Stuttgart.

2008-01-29T18:20:00.000-08:00

much thanks to Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Jan '08.

next shows will be an entirely new program "this fall", as new lunchfilms are coming soon.

Lunchfilm Milwaukee.

2008-01-29T18:09:00.000-08:00

for some reason this seems like a town that needs a lunch. The great Woodland Pattern Book Center put on the Lunchfilms, Dec 07. Thanks to Carl and Sarah...

Lunchfilm UK.

2008-01-29T18:04:00.000-08:00

Nov 07 - The lunches showed as part of a series of films from the New York Underground Film Festival, presented at The Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle. Glad to be part of it.

$35.00

2008-01-29T16:35:00.000-08:00

made by Braden King. (aka "Home Movie", 2009, 14 minutes)

film must:
have a pantry.
show an undercover pocket of goodness.

Braden King is is the co-director and producer of the 1998 feature documentary, Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back, made in collaboration with filmmaker and photographer Laura Moya. A lyric examination the life and landscape of an Aleutian Island community off of the west coast of Alaska, the film toured internationally with live soundtrack accompaniment by the critically-acclaimed Boxhead Ensemble and went on to screen in over twenty major International film festivals, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, The Margaret Mead Film Festival, The DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival, The London Film Festival, The Dublin Film Festival, The Singapore International Film Festival, The Melbourne International Film Festival and more.

www.truckstopmedia.com

Commissioned at Park City Grill, Utah. Cinemad visa#039.

$27.73

2007-12-11T10:59:00.000-08:00

made by Randy Walker and Jennifer Shainin. (aka "Whiskey Priest", 2009, 10 minutes)

film must:
have old folks in it.
some sort of industry.
help people speak.
have some QnA.

remember: "you can't force them to care"

Only bits and pieces here and there are known about RANDY WALKER.
After a failed tennis career, he became a journalist and did political cartoons for small weekly newspapers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Before too long, he got in the habit of using the press cameras to take pictures of Republicans walking in and out of the Elks Club. I come to find out he also worked in a genetics lab for the University of California, Riverside, sequencing the DNA of marsupials from New Guinea. Couldn’t hold down that gig, either. Got to the point where reading poetry in jail sounded pretty good, so he set out to steal a book on ethics from a bookstore and then never read it. Of course, this plan, like so many earlier plans of his, never saw the light of day. He did manage to find himself on a children’s game show called FUN HOUSE when he was eleven, though. “I lost on that, too” he told me, with a smile.

All right, there are a few things you ought to know about JENNIFER SHAININ. When I met her, she was weaving a pillow made entirely of U.S. postage stamps and talking about giant penguins in Antarctica that stand six feet tall. She also had a way of winking at you that made you smile even if you were trying not to. “I don’t think a good film needs to be shot on film,” she explained. “Just like I don’t think you have to have a professional actor in order to get a bang-up performance.” In 2002, she picked up her suitcases and left Los Angeles altogether, opting instead for the Pacific Northwest. Apparently, that’s where she grew up, just outside Mount Vernon, doing the graveyard shift on a pea combine when she was just a kid, telling her first stories into a CB radio while sitting under the Northern Lights.

www.foreignamericanpictures.com

commissioned at Fred 62, Los Feliz, CA. Cinemad visa #38.