OTHER cinema: cump's CALIFORNIA IS AN ISLAND + denning + bravos

Drawing on accounts of Conquistador Hernan Cortes' attempt to colonize Baja California, 16th Century cartographies, and a romance/adventure novel ripe with Amazons; this sneak-preview of (in person) Sarolta Cump's 20-min. experimental doc investigates the fantasies, fears, and fetishes of European explorers through a post-colonial queer lens, and with a bawdy sense of humor to boot! ALSO here for intro and Q&A, Nara Denning's Neurotique No. 6 is an 8-min. "neo silent film" of erotic fantasy, rife with surreal imagery and dark humor. Denning combines the influences of German Expressionism and avant-garde cinema to breathe new life into the notion of the cine-poem. PLUS Former SF artiste and now new faculty at UMich, Alexis Bravos' Argonaut, a 16mm biography of the 19th Century writer/explorer Eliza Farnham, in which a single event in her life is oh-so-cinematically re-imagined. AND Martha Colburn's Wonder Woman animation, Mike Kuchar's Paradise Gone, 3-D Venus Fly Traps, and Handsome Sam Green, segueing from a Sarah Jacobson clip into an invitation to apply for the grant in her name, for emerging women makers. +Sangria! *$7.