This collection brings together a unique group of avant-garde film works. Tearing apart the barriers between eras, borders and mediums, the viewing experience encompass a total experience of the unstrapped brain of subterranean luminosity and high voltage experimentations.

Canadian Institute for Exploratory Cinemas presents the short film anthology of Canadian artist Solomon Nagler. This collection contains the complete anthology, as well as recent cinematic works of Solomon Nagler.

Adapted from a ten-part peephole installation, COWARDS BEND THE KNEE is "jam-packed with enough kinetically photographed action to seem like a never-ending cliffhanger. Set in a shadow-suffused hockey arena and a Mabuse-like beauty salon-slash-abortion clinic, the plot drips with Grecian formula, as sordid family secrets spawn unintentional murder most foul. Winner of the FIRPRESCI Prize at the **Rotterdam International Film Festival.** Nominated for Best Film at the **Lyon Festival of New Generation Cinema.** *"Lurid, tawdry and untoward entertainment from Canada's reigning mad genius." - John Anderson, **Newsday***

Canadian Institute for Exploratory Cinemas presents this transgressive short film compilation. Conceived by the underground film society Cinema Abattoir, the A Rebours short film anthology convey the spectator side of experimental and avant-garde cinema.

Yvonne Rainer's landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.

A short road trip through an abstract virtual world. Traveling over and through landscapes the spectator is taken in a play of light and shade. Sometimes the light moves freely, then it is collected, reflected or transformed. The shades lengthen and crawl together. Quick spotlights create stroboscopic effects, race through curves and settle down. In the end the afterimage fades out and the spectator blinks. Winner of the Grand Prix for Best Animated Short Film at the **Annecy International Animated Film Festival.**

Shot in the bars and seedy hotels of East LA, this film about the inner life of a sex worker imprisoned for killing her pimp won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for "Best Independent/Experimental Film of the Year", and was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial as well as in over 40 other film festivals worldwide. Tinka Menkes brilliantly portrays the emotionally frozen protagonist on a circular inner journey, battling the material and psychic walls which imprison her. New 2K restoration by Arbelos Films.

A stark and revealing examination of romantic alliances, LIVES OF PERFORMERS examines the dilemma of a man who can't choose between two women and makes them both suffer. Originally part of a dance performance choreographed by filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Selected for the National Film Registry by the **National Film Preservation Board.**

An ordinary day. Or is it? People go about their habitual behavior. Characters appear and then reappear in other scenes that may or may not belong together. In CASUAL RELATIONS, hints of melodrama shudder beneath the surface and no one is quite who they seem to be. Everyone is haunted by memories of popular culture -- from classic movies, to the Rolling Stones, to vampire films. Meanwhile, the countdown of Golden Oldies continues late into the night...

Two of the world's most original filmmakers, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have been making their unique blend of puppetry and stop-motion animation for nearly 40 years and have spawned an enormous cult following. The Quays display a passion for detail, a breathtaking command of color and texture, and an uncanny use of focus and camera movement that make their films unique and instantly recognizable. Best known for their classic 1986 film STREET OF CROCODILES, which filmmaker Terry Gilliam selected as one of the ten best animated films of all time, they are masters of miniaturization and on their tiny sets have created an unforgettable world, suggestive of a landscape of long-repressed childhood dreams.

Mark Rappaport's second feature film (amongst a remarkable string of off-beat, experimental narratives that runs from CASUAL RELATIONS to CHAIN LETTERS) takes off from the deliberate anachronism of using modern props, performance styles and attitudes to evoke the romantic entanglements of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Rich La Bonte) with three sisters: Constanza (Margot Breier), Sophie (Sasha Nanus) and Louisa (Sissy Smith). This melodramatic plot of rejection, pining and sacrifice may have its basis in reality, but everything else is strictly stylized: back-projected settings, mix-and-match historical costumes, primary-colored walls, actors striking poses and the miming to records of Mozart arias, frequently interrupted by the raw audio track of real, untrained singing. For Rappaport, the ideological myths we internalize and the soap operas we live have to be exposed and mocked, just as the constructed illusion we call filmic realism has to be relentlessly dismantled. Both very much of its time (a cousin to contemporaneous works by Yvonne Rainer) and ahead of its time (anticipating the droll strategies of Hal Hartley), MOZART IN LOVE offers a handy checklist of the many acute, often hilarious games of disenchantment devised by this ever-inventive artist. "*An irreverent take on Mozart's relations with the three Weber sisters: Louisa, whom he loved, but who didn't love him; Constanza, whom he loved and married; and Sophie, who loved him but whom he didn't love. An anthology of arias from Mozart's operas, in which art comments on life through a cheeky use of back-projection and miming to records.*" -Ian Christie, ***British Film Institute***

Alexandre Rockwell's directoral debut is an adaptation of George Buchner's novella, "LENZ", chronicling the poet Jakob Lenz's slide into insanity and madness. The setting is transposed from 18th century Germany to New York in the early 1980s.