FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 1, 2004

Contact: Melissa Fowler, Festival Director
212/714-8375
reelvenuspress@reelvenus.com
www.reelvenus.com

Reel Venus Film Festival will Make Its Second Orbit
July 20, 21, & 22, 2004
At Peter Norton Symphony Space In Manhattan

A Premiere Showcase of Film/Video Shorts Directed by Women

New York, NY (June 25, 2004) - After a triumphant debut launch in 2003, Reel Venus Film Festival returns for it’s second year to Peter Norton Symphony Space in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater for three evenings, July 20, 21 & 22, 2004 and kicks off, Monday, July 19, 2004 with a cocktail reception and 2 short screenings, at City Center in Studio 5, featuring fresh new work by two Brooklyn based independent directors, Hima B, Magnetic Attraction and Maria Clara, Life On Christopher Street.

Reel Venus Film Festival is a 3 Day Event which was created and launched in 2003 to showcase an eclectic body of current film and video shorts directed by emerging and established women filmmakers from the US and abroad, whose work pushes traditional boundaries in storytelling methods which inspire, entertain, excite, inform and provoke it’s audiences with challenging topics, themes and images. All genres are included with special emphasis given to works that expand the boundaries of creative expression through cinema which uniquely incorporate other media components such as sound, spoken word and performance/dance which give the filmmaker as artist a wider range of tools to create stories with.

Last year’s inaugural festival presented 56 shorts from 7 countries and featured film/video work from established New York talent which included experimental film pioneer Barbara Hammer along with film community favorites, Lisa Robinson, Annie J. Howell, Sarah Bassine and Student Academy Award Winner Eva Saks who returns this year with the festival’s opening day film, Twin Set, a short comedy about sibling rivalry and American politics. A timely film for an election year.

This year’s second annual festival will be three jammed packed evenings consisting of 60 alternative and mainstream shorts from all genres featuring outstanding work from filmmakers locally based in New York and abroad. Highlights include festival favorites from Bay area filmmakers Sonya Shah, Something Between Her Hands and Frances Nkara Downpour Resurfacing which aired recently on PBS’s Independent Lens in Spring 2004. Local work includes Belle by Ruth Sergel, Running on Eggshells by Faith Pennick, Even The Girls by first time director Ashira Siegel, Transit, by Kerry Weldon and The Critical Path/R. Buckminster Fuller by Benita Raphan.

The Kick-Off Cocktail reception on July 19 will highlight two poignant and timely topics in the special screenings by Brooklyn directors Hima B and Maria Clara. Magnetic Attraction directed by filmmaker Hima B is a work in process which the director markets as possibly the first feature cinéma vérité to chronicle both a relationship between lesbians of color and lesbians in a sero-discordant (HIV +/-) partnership. Michelle Lopez, a Venezuelan Trinidadian femme lesbian and “Kitty” Boyd, her African American butch partner, test the physics of love and the chemistry of personalities as they reconfigure their relationship during a time of transition.

The second screening, Life on Christopher Street directed by Maria Clara focuses on urban gay youth and their lives on the most popular gay strip in the world. This piece is an expose on a rising subculture of Black and Latino gay youth born in the late 70’s to early 80’s representing the Hip-Hop generation. The people portrayed in this segment maintain the aggressive hyper masculine image and attitude represented in the Hip-Hop culture, yet they are gay, thus contradicting the stereotypical image of homosexuals.

All screenings start at 6:30 pm and will take place at Symphony Space in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia located in Manhattan at 95th and Broadway.

Festival Kick off Cocktail Reception will take place at City Center in Studio 5 starting at 7 PM. Filmmakers will be in attendance to present and briefly discuss each film. Screenings will be immediately followed by mingling, complimentary cocktails and hors d’oeurves.

Festival screening information will become available during the week of June 28, 2004.
on the following websites, www.reelvenus.com and www.symphonyspace.org

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