Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

Tjùba Tèn (The Wet Season) is an experimental ethnography recorded in the jungle village of Bendekondre, Suriname at the start of 2007. Composed of community-generated performances, re-enactments and extemporaneous recordings, this film functions doubly as an examination of a rapidly changing material culture in the present and as a historical document for the future. Whether the resultant record is directed towards its subjects, its temporary residents (the filmmakers), or its Western viewers is a question proposed via the combination of long takes, materialist approaches, selective subtitling, and a focus on various forms of cultural labor.

San Francisco filmmakers Sam Green and Carrie Lozano (The Weather Underground) bring us a very special multi-media performance as they use the much-maligned PowerPoint™ application to present something between a rough-cut and a lecture on their new film project, The Universal Language. The final film will be a feature-length experimental documentary exploring the battered state of the utopian impulse at the dawn of the 21st century. Weaving together several seemingly unrelated documentary stories – a history of the language Esperanto, a portrait of an American political radical living in exile, a meditation on the world’s largest shopping mall in southern China – the film will ask, in subtle ways, what has happened to our ability to imagine a future based on humankind’s noblest impulses? Why don’t people have utopian dreams anymore, and what does this say about our society today? This very special PowerPoint™ presentation will also feature a live score performed by San Francisco electronic musician Dave Cerf.