Strange Culture, Screening @ Cinema Village

STRANGE CULTURE
2007 - USA - English - 75 minutes
Directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson

Featuring Peter Coyote, Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton,
Cassie Powell, Wallace Shawn

OCTOBER 5-18, 2007

CINEMA VILLAGE
22 East 12th Street
New York, NY 10003
212.924.3363

WATCH TRAILER:
http://www.strangeculture.net/media/qthi-strangeculture.mov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikNO1ANHIQs

The surreal legal nightmare of internationally acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife, Hope, died in her sleep of heart failure. Police arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz's art, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected bioterrorist, as dozens of agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, cat, and even his wife's body. Today Kurtz and his long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, former Chair of the Genetics Department at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, await a trial date.

"Probably the best and certainly the most urgent film in Sundance 2007's
Frontier section." --Dennis Lim, INDIEWIRE

"Younger filmmakers should be looking to Hershman Leeson for lessons on how to reinvent old forms while at the same time telling an urgently topical story. The director not only breaks the fourth wall, she reduces it to plaster dust." --John Anderson, VARIETY

"Why should this case concern us? If the government can just detain willy-nilly, find no cause and still move forward, it's a gross abuse of human rights... STRANGE CULTURE is an important heads-up to what's going on in our country right now in the name of national security, and a brilliant statement on artistic freedom and the dangers it faces. This film should be seen, should be discussed and is an important document on our times." --Mark Bell, FILM THREAT

http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/show_movie.asp?movieid=1047