Non-Compliance: Experimental Shorts

Often shaping a single governing idea into the most miniature of exclamations, many of these short-shorts were deliberately slight. Some were slight and gorgeous (Christiana Latham's "Soldier Toys"; Alexus Young's "Gimme My Fix", Kevin Papatie's "Worlds Apart"); some were slight and charming (Dana Claxton's "Her Sugar Is?"; Simeon Ross's delirious "Penicillium Roqueforti"); several others were just slight. Slightly less slight were Bear Witness's smartly rhythmic Hollywood gaze-collage "Eyes" and Steven Loft's calculatedly nightmarish "down(town) time", which split-screens Loretta Lynn barroom karaoke with a racial assault in the bathroom. Amanda Strong's "Honey For Sale" was not slight at all - a deeply textured lament for honeybees that brilliantly combines advocacy and beauty - abstract instructionism, perhaps? And amid all this were two true epics: beric Manywounds' "I Heard A Light", whose depiction of three women moving through Vancouver toward some kind of spiritual awakening is so ambiguous it's compelling; and "Horse" by Archer Pechawis, a fable of domesticated animals in enlightened revolution that isn't ambiguous, or slight, in the slightest.