Chimera

Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – The marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.

Christabel is an abstract interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic poem about female possession. Adhering to the poem’s structure the film is presented in four parts – Two digital video half hour segments and then two short 16mm conclusions. The contemporary relevance of the poem’s symbols and themes is underlined using performance combined with heavy image and sound layering.

The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

A drifter of a small storefront church's congregation stumbles across a large insect last seen before Christ and emerging en masse to render a new plague upon the world.

Life in a rural industrial town: a teenage boy, his family, friends and failed attempt at love are investigated through stark black-and-white photography and static long takes. Filmed in a fusion of authentic and staged documentation, with robotic performances by actors and non-actors, the piece meditates on the mundane existence of human and animal life.

Video (color)

Short film from James Fotopoulos

A video by James Fotopoulos

Part 2 of 5. Color

Part 1 of 5. B&W

16mm film (b&w/color)

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Part 3 of 5. Color

2003, 5 min, color

"...the simplest and most beautiful of [Fotopoulos'] early video features, which simply follows the movements of a model whose body is (re)filmed so closely that she appears as abstract swirls of colour and video grain." —Maximilian Le Cain