Wednesday, February 29 at 7:30 pm

Flamingos

An outlaw romance noir

by Antero Alli

~~ appearing in person

!WORLD PREMIER!    !WORLD PREMIER!

The Film

Twin sisters, Beatrice and Zoe, are in love with Ray, a philosopher and bank robber driven by visions of the end the world.  Though Beatrice and Ray are married, Ray elopes with free-spirited Zoe and hides out in a motel after a bank heist.  Meanwhile, Beatrice files for divorce as two enigmatic entities from the Bardo interzones take interest in their fates.  This heady and funny film is a cocktail chaser of crime, metaphysics, and obsessive passion.

The Filmmaker

Antero Alli is a Finnish-born, local underground filmmaker with ten feature fiction full-length movies and numerous shorts to his credit.  He personally screens his films in rare, limited runs — usually in west coast art houses (“I don’t have a mainstream bone in my body”).  Though his films have not yet seen widespread theatrical release, they continue to garner high critical praise in, for example, the renegade film review website, “filmthreat.com,” which is far out on the sharpest cutting edge of the film community.  Antero is the founder/director of ParaTheatrical ReSearch (since 1977), a center for group paratheatre work in Berkeley, California, where he resides with his wife, the singer/composer Sylvi Alli.

the website:

http://verticalpool.com/flamingos.html

an excerpt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zbPnrkm9NQ

$10 Donation Requested

Please DO make a meaningful contribution this evening

so that this world premier screening of the film

can offset production costs that went into making it!

To learn more about Film Series held

at Humanist Hall

click here

Wednesday, October 26 at 7:30 pm

The Invisible Forest

by Antero Alli

– appearing in person

This unique, funny, and imaginative feature film was conceived and directed by local filmmaker Antero Alli and features the writings of William Shakesepare and Antonin Artaud.

A theatre troupe camps out in a forest to perform the vision of their Director, Antero Alli.   It’s here in the forest that the Director’s dream story is able to wind itself through a rich tapestry of labyrinthine dreams within dreams which eventually carry us through to the shattering and regenerative conclusion of his cinematic opus.  During their forest experiment, Alex, performed by the Director himself, is haunted by disturbing dreams where the French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud appears and mocks his theatre ambitions.  Artaud’s magic theatre of ghosts, gods, and spirits have come alive in the forest.  These strange repeating nightmares persist, tormenting Alex with the ghost of Artaud.  In an attempt to regain control over his mind, Alex stops sleeping for days to keep the nightmares away.  Sleep-deprived and with his sanity pushed to its limits, he seeks help from a psychotherapist who suggests hypnosis as a means to uncover the source of his disturbance.  What follows is a phantasmagorical journey through the internal landscape of Alex’s subconscious memories and dreams, a sojourn that leads us to a place beyond belief, beyond words, and beyond the mind itself.

In their fascinating dialogues, both Alex and the psychotherapist challenge each other to expand their own world-views.  The work they are doing is an attempt to realize Artaud’s vision of an explosive, transformative form of theater.  Artaud is trying to get Alex to liberate himself from the obsession with particular artistic “forms,” and to instead embrace a way of being which surrenders directly to energy.  This film, which was created through improvisations instead of a script, embodies this principle of art-making in its process.  As the film  progresses, it induces in the viewer some of the same alternate levels of consciousness which form its subject matter.  Alex understands the cosmic Void as being a source of potential energy which creates everything, and the doctor finds this difficult to grapple with.  The doctor understands some basic mechanisms about emotion which Alex has been ignoring at his peril.  Subtly, their dialogue critiques the limits of both psychotherapy and art as avenues of self-exploration.  In a wonderfully bizarre dream cabaret scene, the female spirit of Artaud’s ghost performs a vaudeville act in which she directly humiliates the doctor, who is a symbol for the discipline of psychology, with its need to reduce the mysteries of spiritual adventures to a set of easily understood personal problems.  Artaud, after all, embraced his own mental illness as a liberating force, and waged a life-long losing battle against his psychiatrists.  And in this film, Hermes, the Dream Ego, crouching in a tree and vibrant with crazed revelation, delivers an Artaud monologue wherein he ecstatically embraces the Void and embodies the will to madness with which the spirit of Artaud is tempting Alex.

This remarkable film is full of treasures. It is able to depict those elusive mental states which prove so hard to remember or describe when we awaken from dreams.  It dares the viewer to let go of concepts and accept the risky adventure of following the free, unimpeded energies of the body and mind.

http://www.verticalpool.com/invisibleforest.html

To learn more about Film Series held

at Humanist Hall

click here

Wednesday, June 29 at 7:30 pm

Under a Shipwrecked Moon

A Feature Film by Antero Alli

– appearing in person

The Film

The power of a long-buried family secret is unleashed when the extreme rituals of a self-made shamanic punk rocker catapult him into the spirit realm in search of his father, a ship captain who drowned at sea.  The son accidentally enters the dreams of his comatose Finnish grandfather where he takes on the form of a raven and encounters a giant hedgehog who is, in waking life, his miserly great uncle.  A surreal fable of true love and the mystical depths of ancestral bonds.

The Filmmaker

Antero Alli is a Finnish-born, underground filmmaker living in Berkeley with eleven feature-length works and numerous shorts to his credit.  His films have screened in rare, limited runs (usually in west coast art houses).  Though his films have not yet seen widespread theatrical release, they continue to garner high critical praise at the renegade film review website, “filmthreat.com,” which is on the sharpest cutting edge of the independent film community. (http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?s=ANTERO+ALLI ). Phil Hall says of this film:  “Its extraordinary dream and hallucination sequences take the imagination into new and daring realms that few artists could ever aspire to conceive.” It must be said that all of Antero’s films are beautifully photographed, surprising, suspenseful, delightful, humorous, witty, and serious all at once! And the original musical accompaniment created by Sylvi Alli is also beautiful, soulful, haunting, awesome, and spellbinding!

Website of Film:

http://www.verticalpool.com/moonscape.html

You Tube Excerpt of Film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDQL4_2ASUE

Friday, February 25 at 8:00 pm

!World Premier!

To Dream of Falling Upwards

A Feature Film by Antero Alli

– appearing in person along with the cast and crew

The Film

Here’s a sexy, zany, occult thriller by a local underground filmmaker living in Berkeley and filming in the Bay Area! Now for the first time Antero Alli has pulled out all the stops and presented nudity, sexuality, street language, and drug use in this film! Be advised:  this is an “R” rated film! And be delighted:  this film is full of amazing imagination and unique, mind altering imagery as are all the films of Antero Alli.  Its about an occultist who seeks the aid of a desert bruja to rid himself of a demon.   The story begins with the death of The elder Magus of the Thelemic Temple of Horus.  Jack Mason, a promising young sex magickian cultivated to advance the lineage, loses it all when the elder Magus’ biological son unexpectedly inherits everything with plans to commercialize and franchise the Temple.  Jack plots deadly revenge and falls into a dizzying maze of encounters with underworld characters, desert brujas, and a twist of fate he never saw coming ….  or did he?

The Filmmaker

Antero Alli is a Finnish-born, local underground filmmaker with eleven feature-length works and numerous shorts to his credit which screen in rare, limited runs (usually in west coast art houses).  Though his films have not yet seen widespread theatrical release, they continue to garner high critical praise at the renegade film review website, “filmthreat.com,” which is far out on the sharpest cutting edge of the film community. (http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?s=ANTERO+ALLI ).

Website of Film:

http://www.verticalpool.com/fallingup.html

You Tube Excerpt of Film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAOm1bf5WRI

Wednesday, December 15 at 7:30 pm

The Mind is a Liar and a Whore

By Antero Alli

– appearing in person

And now for a film that takes place in Berkeley — at Christmas time! An Astrologer, a closet Satanist, an Inuit opera singer and a webcast diva — a typical Berkeley household (!) — is forced indoors during an unexpected citywide lockdown initiated by the federal government.  Ona, who has her own webcast show, thinks the feds are shifting into a full-blown police state.  Her roommates think she’s paranoid.  Havoc and hilarity unravel as they all race to their own conclusions about what they think is happening during their escalating states of uncertainty. The challenge of perceived and genuine threats posed in this film clearly parallels the logic that led to the Iraqi fiasco (the phony insistence of WMD and Saddam Hussein’s al-Qaeda support).  We are also reminded that no one was ever arrested for the anthrax poisoning of the U.S. postal system in 2003.

To learn more about Film Series held

at Humanist Hall

click here

Wednesday, May 26 at 7:30 pm

The Invisible Forest

by Antero Alli

– appearing in person

Forests embody threshold spaces where we encounter the spirits of nature as well as ghosts of the psychic, para-spiritual world, says Cedrus Monte in his review of Antero’s Alli‘s film.  It’s here in the forest that Antero’s dream story begins and winds itself through a rich tapestry of labyrinthine dreams within dreams which eventually carry us through to the shattering and regenerative conclusion of Antero’s cinematic opus.

Here’s the story:  A theatre troupe camps out in a forest to perform their director’s vision of Antonin Artaud‘s magic theatre of ghosts, gods, and spirits.  During their forest experiment, Alex, performed by the director Antero Alli, is haunted by disturbing dreams where Artaud appears and mocks his ambitions.  When these strange nightmares persist, Alex stops sleeping in an attempt to regain control over his mind.  Sleep-deprived and with his sanity pushed to its outer  limits, he seeks help from a psychotherapist who suggests hypnosis as a means to uncover the source of his disturbance  What follows is a phantasmagorical journey through the internal landscape of Alex’s subconscious memories and dreams, a sojourn that leads us to a place beyond belief, beyond words, and beyond the mind itself. This unique feature film was conceived and directed by local filmmaker Antero Alli and features the writings of William Shakesepare and Antonin Artaud.

http://www.verticalpool.com/invisibleforest.html

To learn more about Film Series held

at Humanist Hall

click here

Wednesday, March 31 at 7:30 pm

The Greater Circulation

By Antero Alli

– appearing in person

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend“ (via the lyrical Stephen Mitchell translation) is the heart, soul, and mind of this marvelous drama from the master underground film legend Antero Alli.  This production has a deceptively simple concept: an experimental theater company in Berkeley, California, stages a performance ritual based on Rilke’s poem and during the course of rehearsals and production the impact of the poem comes to challenge and haunt the people involved in it. And beyond this concept is a deep, provocative, and often disturbing drama which poses questions of love, art, mortality and grief with the grace and majesty of Rilke’s work.  This docufiction is a marvel of mature emotion and deep wisdom;  few films have been able to explore issues surrounding death with such grace and intelligence.  Rilke himself figures in the film via flashbacks which recreate the physical and emotional circumstances behind “Requiem for a Friend.”

To learn more about Film Series held

at Humanist Hall

click here

Wednesday, March 24 at 7:30 pm

Loaded Visions

By Antero Alli

– appearing in person

These are original experimental short videos — not videotaped poetry readings — that use poetry as oblique narratives as a way of invoking the spirits dwelling in the texts themselves.  If tribal shamans created content for television, these videopoems might be construed as their brand of commercials.  This is a list of the poems that are used:

To learn more about Film Series held

at Humanist Hall

click here