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The Ninth New York Underground Film Festival
LESS A FILM FESTIVAL AS WE KNOW ONE TO be than a blazing Catherine Wheel that rolls over downtown Manhattan every spring, disgorging cinematic fireworks and leaving audiences gasping in its wake, the New York Underground Film Festival clocked its ninth year with a wicked vengeance. Still true to its trashy origins, NYUFF's programming has also grown increasingly sophisticated over the past three or four years, as the festival has emerged at the forefront of an international media scene encompassing other underground festivals throughout North America. Under the guidance of astute and enterprising festival director Ed Halter, NYUFF has evolved into a premier venue for not only "underground" but experimental and documentary cinema as well, a critical esteem doubtless reflected in Halter's invitation to program the 48th Flaherty Seminar this past June.
Of course, any festival's success ultimately depends on its audience, and after the precipitous drop in attendance that struck most New York City film venues and festivals after last September 11, it was extremely heartening to see throngs of NYUFF loyalists turned out in force-in breathlessly demimondaine style-for underground royalty like Nick Zedd, who unsheathed Lord of the Cockrings in one of the festival's many standing-room only shows. By closing night, it felt as though a larger corner had been turned-that the audience's ecstatic embrace of NYUFF was also a battered community's display of self-confidence regained.
Lest that sound too deadly earnest, worry not. NYUFF's unifying motif this year was a heavily ironic starz-'n'-stripes ballyhoo that extended from staffers' flag lapel pins to an ultra-arch mock advertisement for the National Rifle Association in the festival catalogue ("NRA proudly salutes the 9th NYUFF: keep shootin'!"). The twisted patriotic theme lent unusual cohesiveness to the programming, with a particularly trenchant slate of socially conscious documentaries, including Vladimir Gyorski's Dogme-certified drug policy probe, Resin, and Josh Koury's harrowing portrait of terminally alienated youth, Standing By Yourself. Truly extraordinary was Garrett Scott's Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story, a chilling X-ray of the despair in poor white suburbia that drove a troubled veteran on a suicidal rampage through the streets in a stolen army tank. The film ambitiously frames its psychological autopsy and class analysis within the...