Maryland Film Festival Blog

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The 4th Annual Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Invitational returns to the MICA Brown Center with a radical variety of international, independent short animations. Curated by Phil Davis (Towson University) and Max Porter (Maryland Institute College of Art); including narrative, experimental, and music video work made with a variety of techniques ranging from stop motion, hand drawn, to CGI. Come out for a night of weird and beautiful animation and cast your vote for the audience choice award!

Check out the 2015 lineup of animators here.

Sweaty Eyeballs is brought to you by the Animation Department of the Maryland Institute College of Art, the department of Art + Design, Art History, and Art Education at Towson University, and the Maryland Film Festival.

4th Annual Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Invitational Screening
Friday November 20th, 2014
7:30 PM
Falvey Hall Auditorium – MICA Brown Center
1300 W. Mount Royal Ave. Baltimore, MD
$5 ticket price
FREE for students (with valid student ID), University faculty/staff, and
Friends of the Maryland Film Festival

Maryland Film Festival presented in conjunction with the MICA and JHU film departments is proud to bring back to Baltimore director Kris Swanberg and her warm and moving character study UNEXPECTED!

Starring Gail Bean, Cobie Smulders, Anders Holm and Elizabeth McGovern, Unexpected is the nuanced and beautifully acted story of an inner-city high-school teacher who develops a new closeness with her favorite student when both experience the new challenges of pregnancy at the same time.

Director Kris Swanberg will introduce the film and answer your questions after the screening!

Tickets are $10 general public, and free to Maryland Film Festival Friends of the Festival members, as well as MICA+JHU students and staff (w/ ID)!                         

Screening Details:                         

UNEXPECTED

Tues, Nov 17

7:30pm

MICA Brown Center- 1300 Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

2640docs proudly presents ARCHIE’S BETTY: screening and discussion with director Gerald Perry.

ARCHIE’S BETTY is an independent documentary search by journalist and filmmaker Gerald Peary to determine if the characters in Archie comics—Archie, Betty, Veronica, Moose, Jughead. etc.—were modeled on real-life people. As an Archie-obsessed child, Peary believed that somewhere in America there was a real town of Riverdale, where Archie and his teen friends went to school. As an adult, he found that his fantasy might have basis in fact.

Screening Details:

ARCHIE’S BETTY

Sun, Nov 8

7:00pm

Space 2640- 2640 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore, MD 21218

$5-10 sliding scale suggested donation

ARCHIE’S BETTY | USA | ENGLISH | 79MINS | 2015

Adam Katzman, Baltimore City Paper

The Palme d’Or-winning “TASTE OF CHERRY,” about a middle-aged man named Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) cruising for a fill-in Kevorkian to help with his suicide, is provocative in the sense that in many countries, suicide is both illegal and blasphemous. Yet, like most of Abbas Kiarostami’s work, it functions less as a combative manifesto than as a series of contradictions that decentralize its protagonist’s solipsism, fitting their dilemma into larger imbalances of power in contemporary Iran.

The film is loosely structured around hiring interviews conducted by Badii with three potential candidates unwittingly riding shotgun in more ways than one. The exposure to his passenger’s lives and viewpoints causes Badii’s goal to slowly disappear into rearview, much like his car does when Kiarostami pulls back for landscape shots of a car circling the mountainside. One candidate is a Kurdish soldier uncomfortable with orders outside of the military, another an amiable Afghan seminarist nonetheless concerned with blasphemy, and the third a taxidermist from Azerbaijan whose background in nature and death, as well as a specific family medical issue, allows him to pragmatically view the task at hand in a larger evolutionary context. Likewise, their backgrounds subtly shed light on the collateral damage of Iran’s conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan.

The reason for Badii’s suicidal aspiration is deliberately left unclear, making the action both deeply personal and existentially universal. The ambivalence about the act is extended to the procedure itself: Badii has dug a hole in which to overdose on sleeping pills during the night, requiring the hypothetical assistant to make sure he has died the morning after, with explicit instructions to complete the burial only if he doesn’t respond, pay still promised either way. Given that Badii is the owner of a car in a mountain of motorless migrant laborers desperate for a day’s work, and given the transactional nature of the task at hand, the discrepancy in class taints the hiring process with an exploitative imposition, muddling our sympathy with the protagonist and eventually with the film itself.

Without spoiling too much, the story of a religiously dubious quest to transcend life from a mountain ends up aligning as much with the rest of the Iranian new wave as with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s epic mind-fuck “The Holy Mountain.” Kiarostami builds to a meta derailment partially foreshadowed by the docu-fiction blur of his previous masterpiece “Close-Up,” and the lack of closure is less frustrating than liberating. The dialectical inquiries of the preceding 90 minutes provide less a defining statement on one man’s suicide than a Socratic method-like approach to sorting through the confusion of one’s surroundings.

In a Q&A at a 2014 Syracuse University screening, Kiarostami said, “the film was banned in Iran for being a suggestion for suicide. But in truth, it is a suggestion to live.” Of the filmmakers facing censorship in Iran, Abbas Kiarostami’s output at first feels like the least overtly radical. Where fellow Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Bahman Ghobadi flirt with protest art and the problem film in ways that give their respective house arrest and exile understandable context, Kiarostami nudges societal foundations by throwing his own authority as a storyteller into question. He more quietly reflects on structural power. With “TASTE OF CHERRY,” as with many of his other masterpieces, the tools for any such work are extended, like an olive branch, to the spectator in a way that ensures its power is much harder to pin down and snuff out.

“TASTE OF CHERRY” plays at the Walters Art Museum on Oct. 22. A discussion about the film with critic and filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire will follow the screening.