September 2007 - Roger Beebe

Filmmaker: Roger Beebe
Film: The Short Films of Roger Beebe:  Documents/Experiments/Wisecracks
September 12-20, 2007

About the filmmaker | About the film | Opening Short | Tour Dates & Locations| Roger Beebe's Homepage | Trailer

About the filmmaker:

Roger Beebe is an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Florida. He has shown his previous films and videos at McMurdo Station in Antarctica and on the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square as well as at scores of less exotic locales (Rotterdam, NY Expo, Cinematexas, NY Underground, etc.).  Beebe ran Flicker Chapel Hill from 1997-2000 and is currently the artistic director of FLEX FEST, the Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival.

About the films:

Filmmaker Roger Beebe has been making experimental shorts for well over a decade, using a wide variety of media and styles. In his collection Four More Years, he draws from the middle portion of his career, the years 2001-2005, in order to give us an exploration of the American landscape, both in a physical and psychological fashion. Through films that range from the wildly aggressive, nearly frantic pace of The Strip Mall Triology to the more slow and contemplative SAVE, Beebe highlights many of the amusing contradictions, interesting juxtapositions, and strange quirks of the contemporary world.

His topics range from a look at the suburban landscape in The Strip Mall Triology and Composition in Red in Yellow, to an exploration of technology in gender in A Woman, A Mirror, to a satire of traditional binary thinking about race in Famous Irish Americans. His style is just as diverse as his material. He shoots in high-tech digital, traditional 16mm, or home video double 8mm, and Super 8 film. Some of his films are marked by a vivid, intense, and fast paced montage style, while others take a more quiet and thoughtful approach to the subject matter at hand.

Ultimately, Beebe's keen sense of observational humor shines throughout and ties the collection together, allowing his viewers to take pleasure in the strange juxtapositions presented therein.

Opening Short:

Mr. Extion
Directed by Griffin Hood and Barry Battles (Fiction)
Two life long friends and aspiring filmmakers find that developing an original idea, with no budget, is hard to pull off...especially down South. Through the span of a day, the two reveal their true feelings on film, stereotypes, race, and each other.

Tour Dates & Locations: