A protest to US intervention in third world countries, ACROSS THE BORDER is constructed with found images, such as live chickens being wrapped in newspaper.
Awards: First Prize, Experimental category, Santa Fe Winter Film Expo, 1983; Bronze Award, Houston Int'l Film Festival, 1983; First Prize, Experimental category, Universiade Int'l Film Festival; Cash Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival.
Exhibition: Edinburgh Int'l Film Festival; Women in the Director's Chair Festival; WTTW, Chicago; Baltimore Int'l Film Festival; Anti-WWIII Festival; SF Bay Area Showcase, SF Int'l Film Festival; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; KQED-TV, San Francisco; SF Cinematheque; East Meets West, University of Southern Florida; Artists' Television Access, SF; Humboldt State University, Women's Film Festival; Pushing the Margins, Women in Experimental Film, Salt Lake City; Women of the Americas Film Video Festival; UC Theater, Berkeley; Festival of Int'l and Progressive Film and Video.
1982, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
"VIA RIO is an ode to our human desire for relationship. The film tumbles through a series of relationships woven around one woman's narration of her parents' marriage. This woman (played by Lilian Mafra) is a fresh and fecund personality who relates the story of her mother's infidelities while sitting naked and pregnant in a garden. Interspersed around this narrative are a number of other scenes that feed the complex nature of human interaction. Interaction that is sometimes comic, sometimes lonely, but, as the very pregnant Mafra indicates - inevitably a part of life." - Frances De Vuono
Award: Cash Award and Tour, Ann Arbor Film Festival
Exhibition: SF Cinematheque; New Films '85, Koukosai Theatre; Humboldt State University, Women's Film Festival; No-Nothing Cinema; Daytona Beach Community College; Virginia Commonwealth University; Filmworks/School of Art, Kent State University; University of Wisconsin; Neighborhood Film/Video Project, Int'l House, PA; Pagoda Palace, SF.
1985, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $20
Parallels fragmentation and fragility through explorations that question ideas of wholeness and reconstruction in the film form.
Award: SF Art Institute Film Festival
Exhibition: SF Cinematheque; SF Arts Commission Gallery; Exploratorium, SF; Peralta College Television.
1988, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
This film is about birth, death and timelessness. Stories told by my grandparents are heard as a series of images that poetically repeat and weave through the narration and ambient sounds.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 6.5m, $20
ZERO HOUR examines the changing face of war documentation by deconstructing a 1945 US Navy-sponsored film promoting Victory Bonds that depicts WWII orphans wandering through rubble searching for food, migrating and caring for their siblings. By optically printing the WWII footage and intercutting other footage of documentation, ZERO HOUR constructs an apocalyptic reality in which the 1945 footage becomes timeless and the face of war seems to be an inherent aspect of humanity.
1992, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
LOVE STORIES MY GRANDMOTHER TELLS, Part 1 is a portrait of Dana Plays' 90-year-old grandmother, Peggy Regler, reminiscing about her love affairs and significant relationships. Regler tells about her failed first marriage, the agreement she had to stay until the children were grown (but to see other lovers) which resulted in the true love she found with her second husband, renowned writer Gustav Regler, who later died a tragic death in India. The love affairs are historically rooted in the technological and political developments of the 20th Century and are narratively based in a complex sound/image structure.
Interludes between the stories (silent optically-printed film passages narrated with intertitles excerpted from Regler's diaries and early childhood memories) formalistically refer to early cinema. The footage in these passages is recontextualized and interwoven metaphorically throughout the text.
1994, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
Nuclear Family is an experimental film that explores institutional and personal representations of memory and behavior through an interweaving of scientific documentation, animal behavior experiments and vintage pre-school footage. The approach is formalistic and optically printed material is used throughout. The drama of the nuclear family is played by a series of non-human subjects - ranging from mannequins used in 1950s nuclear blast experiments, to doves playing ping-pong. The notion of family is experienced as iconic, nostalgic and a recollected remnant of the nuclear age.
"Nuclear Family uses found footage to create a dark portrait of the violence and turbulences underlying seemingly ordinary family life." - Steve Anker
2001, 16mm, co/so, 22m, $70