Music Video:

- TOUGH BOY by le margot

- UPTOWN LINE by escape video / bernard filipetti, featuring suicide

Feature Film:

AROUND... by david spaltro

BiFF was established in 1998 as the first international competitive film festival in New York. BiFF’s primary goal is to connect filmmakers to distribution companies and expose them to the media. Many films that have premiered at BiFF in past years went on to be released theatrically and/or are available at video stores near you.

Below are short synopses of the films that will be presented.
Additional information on each film is available here.

LAST LETTER 
Dir: Ted Ciesielski, United States, 5 min, Experimental
A stark urban landscape of rooftops, billboards, and highways provide the backdrop for an open love letter that never reaches its recipient: a young soldier in Iraq.

THE REPLICANTS: USER 
Dir: Edouard Salier, France, 4 min, Experimental
Fingers control a flip book that reveals a series of pictures. With each flashing image, spectator access is denied. People, signals of the digital age, and constructions of civilization are edited together to form a rapid firing of information. The film is reminiscent of media images injected into everyday onlookers. Short thrills are exemplified, making the flip book a series of ‘cinematic attractions' -- a kind of peep show for viewers.

DAYS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME 
Dir: Jan Zajicek, Czech Republic, 4 min, Experimental
A wild love affair that culminates in a tragic end is captured entirely in one shot by a motion-controlled camera. Time is frozen when the angel of death opens his eyes as velvety black cats encircle a dead body.

ROASTBEEF 
Dir: Francois Begin & Miryam Bouchard, Canada, 6 min, Experimental
A woman becomes inspired to perform an enticing dance for a butcher who cuts roast beef.

A LETTER TO COLLEEN 
Dir: Carolyn & Andy London, United States, 9 min, Animation
Head smack into the purgatory of modern teenage life. Using fittingly raw and economical animation, this film is a harsh and to find absolution for having lived too much, too young, and too fast.

WITH DELICATE RISK 
Dir: Dane Webster, United States, 3 min, Animation
The film explores ideas of creation myth and evolution through the use of various systems of motion applied to a human arm. This animation uses procedural and systematic approaches to animated motion to explore the viewer's notions of gesture and the perceived emotions that are related to those gestures.

THE VERY FIRST DESIRE NOW AND FOREVER 
Dir: Signe Baumane, United States, 1 min, Animation
A character's first desire is explored....

HERZOG AND THE MONSTERS 
Dir: Lesley barnes, Scotland, 4 min, Animation
In a digital cut-out animated film, a graphic fairytale is depicts little Herzog's journey through a forest. The woods are full of monsters that are actually letters. The film explores how language has the ability to embody wealth.

POPOL VUH 
Dir: Ana Maria Pavez, Chile, 10 min, Animation
A tale of creation based on "Popul Vuh: the Ancient Stories of the Quiché," written by the indigenous Maya Quiché people after the Spanish Conquest. The vibrant illustrations are taken from Mayan codices, paintings found on vessels, and stones carved with scenes from the "Popul Vuh" between the years 300-900 A.D. Accompanying the narrator is original music performed with pre-Columbian and other ethnographic instruments from the Americas. The text relates solely to the creation of the world and humankind, and gives the viewer a unique look into Mayan culture and history. The story is told in its native Spanish language, with English subtitles.

AFTER YOU LEAVE... 
Dir: Molly Schwartz, United States, 4 min, Animation
We thought the conflict of the neighborhood existed in the realm of construction, rent increases and population explosion, but there is another offensive underway...the mute struggle of the linden, ash, gingko and plane tree. This project documents a silent war, the War of the Trees. Here we see the trees’ stoic refusal to submit to the dominating infrastructure–aggressive constriction and unremitting subjugation by the sidewalks, fences, buildings and decorative borders in this arboreal battle-zone.

Maybe It's The Weather was filmed in late January at the Greenpoint Coffee House.
The screenplay, written by Miles Harvey, is an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Clean Well Lighted Place."
It centers around closing time at a cafe. two waiters discuss the last customer, an old drunk, as they prepare to leave for the night.

There is more grace and courage in the famous image of Giulietta Masina smiling through her tears in Federico Fellini's 1957 "Nights of Cabiria," than there is in all the fire-breathing blockbusters Hollywood has to offer.

The star's prize-winning, heartbreaking performance, the story's allegorical resonance and Fellini's sweeping, soulful vision of a Roman prostitute's resilient humanity mark "Nights of Cabiria" as a cinematic masterpiece. Not coincidentally, "Nights of Cabiria" has been refurbished and revived by the same team (Bruce Goldstein of Film Forum and Mike Thomas) who brought back Godard's "Contempt" last year, and who display the same acumen in reissuing a film of special prescience. Though it was shot in black and white amid the stark poverty of postwar Italy, neither the style nor the searching of "Cabiria" has grown dated at all.

As an outgrowth of characters played by Miss Masina in her husband's earlier films, "The White Sheik," "Il Bidone" and "La Strada," the unforgettable Cabiria is a tiny, scrappy survivor who drifts almost magically among the film's varied realms. In three astonishing long sequences here, she is taken under the wing of a movie star, disillusioned by a religious pilgrimage with carnival overtones and cruelly tricked by a hypnotist who exposes her once-secret dreams.

The new print, which yellows at a few points but retains a beautiful depth and clarity, also includes an episode that has not been seen in the film since its original showing 41 years ago at the Cannes Film Festival.

In this section of the movie, a character who became known as "the man with the sack" takes Cabiria with him as he distributes food to people so poor that they live in underground caves. Beyond affording Cabiria a premonition of her own possible future, this fluid and mysterious episode drew the censure of Roman Catholic authorities, who saw the good Samaritan as a reproach to organized religion (there are many in the film) and asked that it be excised.

In the course of her eventful travels, Cabiria undergoes the profound spiritual evolution that gives the film its lingering grandeur. Anyone dismayed by the hyperkinetic emptiness of so much current film spectacle will find the antidote -- a deep, wrenching and eloquent filmgoing experience -- right here.

Janet Maslin

AAAA Locksmiths (featuring members of Flaming Fire and Marianne Nowottny) bring together the outlaw country stylings and attitude of Johnny Paycheck, George Jones and Jeannie C. Riley with the fried punk-rock electro sounds of Cobra Killer, Big Black and Rammstein. Featuring a manic square-dance caller, a crazed square-dance troupe and the best honky-tonk guitarist in Florida, AAAA Locksmiths are the best band for an unhinged, wild barn-stomp, bar none!

Ambergris is a musical experiment in storytelling and synesthesia.  The band consists of Matthew Thurber, often Hiroshi Kimura and Rebecca Bird, and usually masks, scrolls and other props.  Ambergris has performed in locations such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Issue Project Room in New York, and the 215 Festival in Philadelphia.
 
DJ Liz Armstrong
Liz Armstrong has performed with To Live and Shave in L.A., and written long-running arts columns detailing the arts scenes of different cities for the Chicago Reader and the Las Vegas Weekly, and is a big star. She is currently writing about fragrances and Norwegian fashion, and djs at Heathers Bar.

Sweeney Todd
Tim Burton
116 minutes 2007

The story of Sweeney Todd, the London barber who cuts his customers' throats and has their bodies baked into pies by his Fleet Street neighbour, Mrs Lovett, is one of those gruesome stories we first hear as children. I have no recollection where I first came across this urban legend, though I do remember passing fleapit cinemas in the 1940s that were showing a British B-movie on the subject starring a great barnstorming exponent of Grand Guignol with the splendid name Tod Slaughter. The tale touches on all sorts of fears, including the vulnerability you feel in a barber's chair and, especially, cannibalism.

For his musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stephen Sondheim drew on a little-known British play of 1973 by Christopher Bond that refined and embellished its Victorian sources. He worked once more with the British writer Hugh Wheeler, who before turning to the theatre had been a prolific author of detective novels under the pseudonym Patrick Quentin. Sondheim is also fascinated with crime and wrote an ingenious movie thriller The Last of Sheila with Anthony Perkins.

The musical was not a great success initially, and in the short-lived 1990 London production that marvellous actor Denis Quilley was too jovial as Sweeney. But it's now rightly regarded as a classic. More or less sung through with the minimum of dialogue, its lyrics are harsh, witty, ironic, its music influenced in part by Kurt Weill and Bernard Herrmann's scores for Hitchcock.

Tim Burton, who dropped the upbeat songs from the 1971 film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when he came to make a more sinister version three years ago, has found a perfect subject in Sweeney Todd, and he's working for the fifth time with Johnny Depp, an actor put on earth to play the part. His presence is powerful, his singing clear, dramatic, unembarrassed. The animated opening titles drip with blood, and when the gore starts to flow in Victorian London about half an hour later, it spurts and cascades until the final scene.

The film begins as Sweeney comes up the Thames in a sailing ship, he and his young companion Frank singing 'No place like London', a celebratory song for Frank but for Sweeney a hymn of hatred for the city's squalor and vice. Once ashore, Sweeney tells him the story of Benjamin Barker, a kindly man whose beautiful wife and small daughter are coveted by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), and how the wife is destroyed when Barker is framed and transported to Australia.

Now Barker is back, disguised as Sweeney, with vengeance on his mind in a wonderful looking studio-created London, the work of production designer Dante Ferretti and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski. The sets are as splendid as those created by Martin Childs and photographed by Peter Deming in From Hell, the Hughes Brothers' film starring Johnny Depp as a Scotland Yard inspector investigating the Jack the Ripper murders, and they too appear to be influenced by Victorian paintings, especially the school of William Frith and the nocturnes of Atkinson Grimshaw and Whistler.

Depp has a ghoulish appearance, his unnatural pallor recalling his first appearance in a Burton film as the eponymous Edward Scissorhands, who has knives and scissors instead of fingers, which under stress turn from delicate instruments of refinement to weapons of bloody destruction. When Sweeney returns to his old shop, kept for him by the devoted Mrs Lovett (Helen Bonham Carter), he hymns his box of razors with a song that begins, 'These are my friends/ See how they glisten'. Mrs Lovett, a distraught pale-faced beauty with black rings around her bright eyes, wishes to restore him to normal life. But when he kills a blackmailer and she disposes of the body by putting it into the pie, the moral and political dice are cast. His obsessions with avenging the destruction of his family is all-consuming and becomes directed at a whole society. He constructs a special barber's chair to despatch his victims down a chute to the cellar, and it soon becomes an industrial process.

A major consequence is that Mrs Lovett's pies, once unpleasantly tasteless, become the toast of London, selling like hot cakes. The killing and the cannibalism become a metaphor for cut-throat capitalism and the transformation of our fellow human beings into a disposable consumer commodity.

In an extended dream sequence Mrs Lovett creates a light, bright idyllic world where she and Sweeney picnic in the countryside, bathe by the sea, get married and adopt the street orphan Toby as a son. This dream is shattered by the barber's obsession and by the depths to which they have sunk. Bloody retribution, melodramatic but tinged with tragedy, inevitably ensues. Before then there has been a deal of incidental humour and two considerable comic performances of a positively Dickensian kind by Timothy Spall as the creepy Beadle Bamford, sly toady to Judge Turpin (also Dickensian in style), and Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, the phoney Italian barber and peddler of elixirs.

The film is jaunty, beautifully rhythmic in its camera movements and editing, extraordinarily rapid without being obtrusively hasty. Two hours were suddenly over and there I was in the foyer eating a warm meat pie, smiling at what I'd been lured into doing. This is a shocking film, the first musical, I believe, to get an 18 certificate (unless you consider Max Ophüls's La Ronde, which was awarded an 'X' back in 1950). But it's ultimately an exhilarating one.

Philip French

or

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Andrew Dominik
159 minutes 2007

It happened with regularity in the '70s, but every once in a while, a major studio accidentally produces a work of art like The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford—a dark, iconoclastic Western that lacks clear heroes and villains, tucks its only shoot 'em up sequence in the opening reel, and closes on a note of profound ambiguity and regret. In look and tone, it recalls moody revisionist Westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Shooting, but with a special attentiveness to the natural world that's closer to Terrence Malick. But perhaps its closest antecedent is Walter Hill's underrated Wild Bill, another story of an outlaw who had the misfortune of being a legend before his death, thus inviting fame-seekers to strike him down. Both films derive a sick sort of tension from the inevitable, as their paranoid anti-heroes wait for an end that they seem to know is coming.

Though the furthest thing from effects-laden spectacle, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's mesmerizing Distant needs to be seen in a movie theater, because without the subtle impact of its photography and soundtrack, it wouldn't amount to much of anything. A deadpan comedy/drama that details the chilly relationship between an urbanite loner and his visiting cousin from the sticks, the film recalls the odd-couple dynamic in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, but with even less incident. In a medium primed for movement and action, it's tough to make ennui register for audiences as something other than outright boredom, but Ceylan sustains a precise, evocative mood that's saturated with melancholy. An emerging name in world cinema, Ceylan has drawn comparisons to Andrei Tarkovsky (whose Stalker plays on TV in one scene) and Abbas Kiarostami, but his long takes and funny/sad look at urban alienation have more in common with Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?), almost like a mirror image from the other side of the continent. The slow-burning tension in Distant only manifests itself in one melodramatic scene, yet the film communicates everything it needs to about the ever-widening gulf that separates two men from each other and the world around them. Living a comfortable middle-class existence in Istanbul, photographer Muzaffer Özdemir numbs the pain of a recent divorce through discreet sessions with a prostitute, but his sadness swells when his ex-wife announces that she's moving to Canada to start a new life with someone else. A clean, fastidious, and antisocial personality, Özdemir finds his sanctuary broken when his cousin Emin Toprak, a slovenly simpleton from his old hometown, comes to stay with him while looking for work on a ship. After quickly finding that the recession is as bad in Istanbul as it is in the country, Toprak spends the days and weeks wandering the city aimlessly, trying (and failing) to work up the courage to approach various young women. These men have loneliness in common, but they certainly don't turn to each other for company—especially Özdemir, who drives Toprak out of the room by flipping to soporific TV shows, then pops in a porno tape after he leaves. More often than not, Ceylan favors camera and sound effects over dialogue and action to suggest their feelings of remove, blurring the foreground or background of a shot to make focal distance seem physical or suffusing scenes with the far-off horns and lapping waves of the harbor. While it takes a little patience to engage with it, Distant has an indelible sense of city life that can't be expressed in words.

Scott Tobias

The pageant will start at 9 with host Jared Whitham and Musical guest: Something In Spanish

After party ($5) will start at about 11:45PM with a set by Something In Spanish followed by DJ Sir Hannett

Again seats are going fast; r.s.v.p. at mizzgreenpoint@brooklynglamour.com

Many surprises and lots of fun ahead.

Amy Daulton and Robert Cividanes each present their one person show in which they explore their personal journeys that led them to stand up comedy.
They offer a glimpse into what it takes to look at the not so funny truths in life and create comedy out of them.

How to be a better neurotic
written and performed by Amy Daulton

Amy's voice is currently starring in a Mastercard radio commercial. Amy is one half of the two person sketch sho, Fantastic Genius, and will be performing in their 2 year anniversary show in July.

I cried until I laughed
written and performed by Robert Cividanes

Robert can be seen performing stand-up every Friday night at New York Comedy Club.  Robert has  also performed at The Broadway Comedy Club, Stand Up New York, the Comedy Village and Carolines. Robert's recent road gigs include  Poconuts and The Weston Firehouse Fundraiser, both located in Pennsylvania.

La Jetée (The Pier)
Chris Marker
France 1962 28 minutes

Revived most recently as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, "La Jetée" considers a future eradicated by war, but it's really more about holding onto the past. Through an assemblage of gorgeous black-and-white stills, Marker shows a devastated Paris in the aftermath of World War III, where the few survivors are scurrying underground due to radiation levels on the surface. A man is chosen to embark on an experimental time-travel mission to find a solution to humanity's dire situation, but temporal folds prove to be tricky. With its brilliant conceit, which tightens the narrative and offers a lesson on editing fundamentals, the film reaches a conclusion common to a lot of time-travel stories, which is that knowledge of the future doesn't necessarily empower people to change it.

Scott Tobias

Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers
Nick Park
UK 1993 30 minutes

Wallace and Gromit, an inventor and his highly intelligent dog, live together in a cozy English idyll aided by various handy gadgets straight out of the cartoons of Heath Robinson. Then they take in a devious penguin lodger who drives Gromit from his room, and ultimately out of the house. The evil little bird also happens to be a master criminal and he soon exploits Wallace's peculiar genius to steal a diamond from the local museum.

Nick Park creates a kind of dynamic previously confined to two-dimensional animation and with tightly structured narrative pays homage to a broad cinematic heritage. The penguin's efforts to drive a sleeping Wallace through the museum in a pair of remote-controlled trousers and the finale in which they hurtle around the house on a model train are set pieces as thrilling as any in live action blockbusters.

Gromit is the most expressive cartoon dog since Snoopy, and without uttering a word he carries the story through its all too brief 30 minutes. Attention to detail makes it a rewarding film to watch and re-watch, with amusing headlines and daft wallpaper. The film earned itself an Oscar and its studio a reputation big enough to make the feature length claymation movie, "Chicken Run". It's the kind of children's fare adults want to be a part of.

Nick Hilditch

Nuit et Brouillard (Night & Fog)
Alain Resnais
1955 France 32 minutes

Alan Resnais' profoundly influential and powerful documentary was hailed by Francois Truffaut as "the greatest film ever made." It takes its title from Hitler's decree that anyone who endangered Germany's security was to "vanish without trace (in the) night and fog" of the Third Reich. Commissioned by the French Committee for the History of the Second World War, Night And Fog was made in 1955 and illustrates with brutal detail exactly what went on inside the 'death factories' of Struthuf, Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Belsen, Ravenbruck and Dachau. Footage was shot with the Nazi's own cameras, and those of the liberating Allied Forces. These black and white images are carefully juxtaposed with color footage of a tour of the ruins of Auschwitz in the 50s, and newsreel pictures of high-ranking Nazi's such as Julius Streicher, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler.

César Award winning actor Michel Bouquet narrates Jean Cayrol's script, accompanied by an emotive yet unobtrusive score from Hanns Eisler. No holocaust documentary could ever make for easy viewing, but Night And Fog is about as graphic as it gets, showing buckets of detached heads lining the corridors, medical 'experiments' in progress, and huge mounds of half burnt bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. It also investigates the design, building and day-to-day running of the camps, as well as highlighting bizarre attempts to create 'mini-villages' in the larger camps, by installing zoos, brothels and, ironically, prisons.

Aidan Elliott