Solo journalist and documentary artist Farrah Hoffmire was inspired by grassroots organizing and volunteer efforts in the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina. She has traveled to New Orleans numerous times to create a solo work that is part art-vignette, part documentary film and part grassroots journalism. In stark contrast to the failure and corruption stories that have dominated mass-media coverage, Falling Together introduces us to powerful people fighting to save lives, preserve culture, and bring a sense of well-being back to New Orleans. Conceived as an ongoing subscription-based platform to follow events in New Orleans as they unfold over the next few years, it also explores the ongoing complexities of rebuilding in areas of the city still severely damaged—such as the Lower 9th Ward. The film features music by Ani Difranco as well as top New Orleans musicians.

This screening is part of the Hurricane Katrina Campus Media Project 2007, produced by Organic Process Productions. In addition to the screening, a multimedia art exhibition of work featuring portraits of New Orleans residents and video installations will be on view in Asbury Hall at The Church from 11 a.m.—4 p.m. This event is sponsored by The Church and Righteous Babe Records.

(2007, 75 min.)
$10
Benefit screening of Strange Culture, Lynn Hershman Leeson's critically-acclaimed new documentary about Buffalo artist Steven Kurtz: Saturday, September 8, 2007 at 7 p.m. at the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center. All proceeds will go to the Critical Art Ensemble Trial Fund. Professor Kurtz will be present to answer questions after the special Benefit Screening on September 8.

The Case
Strange Culture chronicles the surreal nightmare of Steven Kurtz, an art professor at SUNY Buffalo and a founding member, with his late wife, Hope, of the internationally exhibited art and theater collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Over the past decade cultural institutions worldwide have hosted CAE's participatory theater projects that help the general public understand biotechnology and the many issues surrounding it. In May 2004 the Kurtzes were preparing to present Free Range Grain, a project examining GM agriculture, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), when Hope Kurtz died of heart failure. Police who responded to Steve Kurtz's 911 call deemed the couple's art suspicious, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was illegally detained as a suspected "bioterrorist" as dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife's body. Today Kurtz and long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, face trumped-up charges of "mail fraud" and "wire fraud," punishable, thanks to the PATRIOT Act, by up to 20 years in prison.

Buffalo Art Community Joins Worldwide Support of Kurtz and Ferrell
Because the case threatens to establish dangerous precedent for artists and for anyone exercising their First Amendment rights, it has attracted worldwide attention, with fundraisers to support Kurtz and Ferrell organized on 5 continents. Hallwalls and Market Arcade join the many artists, scientists, and concerned citizens who have responded to this outrageous, politically-motivated case, to raise urgently needed money for Kurtz and Ferrell's legal defense. For more information about the case, including an archive of press materials, please visit www.caedefensefund.org

The Film
Since the ongoing nature of the case prevents Kurtz from discussing its details, Hershman Leeson has enlisted actors to dramatize parts of the story, skillfully interweaving dialogue with news footage, animation, interviews, testimonials, and footage of Kurtz himself. Tilda Swinton (Chronicles of Narnia, Broken Flowers) and Thomas Jay Ryan (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) play Hope and Steve Kurtz, and Peter Coyote (Femme Fatale) plays Dr. Robert Ferrell. Strange Culture poses questions that are more universal than local at this point in our nation's history. How can artists whose works are critical of government policy continue to create freely given the escalating paranoia of the state? What liberties do we loose to "protect freedom?" The case of Kurtz and Ferrell is of concern not only to scientists, artists, and activists, but to anyone interested in contributing to vital public debate about the actions of their government. More information about the film, including trailers, can be accessed on the web at www.strangeculture.net

Bring your Hallwalls membership card to receive a discount

(2007, 93min)

Thirty years after bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols infamously shocked the system with their hard, fast, status-quo-killing rock, the longest-running punk band in history is drawing bigger crowds than ever, "pop-punk" bands have found success on MTV, and kids too young to drive are forming bands that carry the torch for punk's raw, immediate sound. Meanwhile, "punk" has become a marketing concept to sell everything from cars to vodka, and dyed hair and piercings mark a rite of passage for thousands of kids. Can the true, nonconformist punk spirit still exist in today's corporatized culture?
Featuring interviews, performances, and behind-the-scenes journeys with the bands, labels, fans, and press who keep punk alive, Punk's Not Dead dares to juxtapose pop-punk's music and lifestyle against the roots in the 70s and 80s, resulting in unexpected revelations. Punk's Not Dead takes you into the sweaty underground clubs, backyard parties, recording studios, and yes, shopping malls and stadium shows where punk rock music and culture continue to thrive. Director Susan Dynner's DIY independent film searches for the soul of a subculture and celebrates all things loud, fast, and spiked, showing punk is stronger and more relevant today than it's ever been.

With co-curator by Andres Tapia-Urzua in person
Raw Tactics Of The Subversive Body is a video show featuring the work of twenty national and international video makers working with the human body as a form of individual expression—political, artistic and extreme. The idea for this program came up while observing the recent proliferation of the use of the human body as a political tactic—among others—in the form of suicide bombers, martyrs of the environment, human shields, human-cyber transformers, organic searchers of the body & soul connection, self expressive markers of the flesh, sexual self-awareness, etc.

Curators Andres Tapia-Urzua (Plan Z Media) and Alberto Roblest (Torre Visual) collaborated in the production of this show as they were both interested in the political and artistic uses of the body; its representation through the mass-media; and its artistic explorations through video and film—perhaps as a symbol of one of the ultimate subjective realities against organized systems of power. Themes include: the body as a weapon, the body as a symbol of resistance, the body vs. the machine, the organic body vs. the technological body, the spiritual quest of the material body, the martyr body, the pleasure body, the sacrificial body, the illegal body, the artistic body, the modified body, the medical body, the perverted body, the marked body, the erotic body, the diseased body, the desperate body vs. bureaucracy, the informational body, the body kamikaze, the sacrificial body, etc.

Participants (in order of appearance):
John Allen Gibel, Colette Copeland, Andrew Johnson, H. Michel Sanders,  Andres Tapia-Urzua, Marco Casado, Terry Mohre, Ian Wallace, Luis Ramirez Guzman, Brenda Moreno Torres, SubRosa, Sarah Minter, Sal Ricalde, Jeff Silva, Mary Magsament & Stephan Hillerbrand, Eva Drangsholt, Caroline Koebel, Federico Peretti, Alberto Roblest and Carolina Loyola-Garcia.