The Milwaukee Underground Film Festival – put on annually by UW-Milwaukee’s department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres – returns April 25-28. We asked a few students and their adviser for their favorite entries from years past.
Lori Felker
Festival Director/Adviser
Ceibas Epilog: The Well of Representation by Evan Meaney (MUFF 2011)
I’ve been aware of the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival for many years and first screened one of my own films there in 2010 (This is My Show, honorable mention). Since then, I had screened a few more times and was a juror for fest. I joined the Film Department at UWM in 2015 and started teaching the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival class in 2018. This is all to say that I’ve seen a lot of films at MUFF over the years. I have to say, I really loved seeing Evan Meaney’s Ceibas Epilog: The Well of Representation for the first time at MUFF when I was a juror. Made from hacked 16-bit video game technology, it’s about our journey toward death, but it’s oddly joyful.
Britany Gunderson
Programmer, Projectionist
An Ecstatic Experience by Ja’Tovia Gary (MUFF 2017)
This film stands out to me because of the use of found footage and hand manipulation of the footage, which represents a long and painstaking process of physically scratching on the film while dealing with important subject matter.
Austin Jason Mason-Meisenheimer
Programmer
Wishful Thinking by Allan Brown (MUFF 2018)
The suspense that built through the duration of a slow progressing image of race horses was quite exciting. Definitely not something you expect to see in a short film, but it managed to break all the rules beautifully.
Hugo Ljungbaeck
Programmer
As if the color was looking at you by Sara Bonaventura (MUFF 2018)
Bonaventura’s three-channel dance video installation is processed through analog synthesizers which disrupt, change, and reinterpret the video signal while creating colorful layers of feedback, delay and noise. The images are endlessly evolving and relentlessly reinventing themselves, creating an exciting audiovisual space you can sit in for a long time.
Jack Hietpas
Programmer, Designer
Heliopolis, Heliopolis by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy (MUFF 2018)
A truly bizarre and uncategorizable film that asks the audience to read words out loud. As the crowd participated in the film together, it felt like we were being brainwashed into a cult. Definitely the most memorable experience of MUFF 2018!
