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A Short Trip Between Art and Life
-Damon Brown
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it …” - Jean-Luc Godard, French filmmaker and writer
 Movies have long been a source of fascination. The combination of larger-than-life moving picture with heightened sound transports us to a place we can only find in dreams. The movies are escape and the movies teach us about ourselves, mirroring our culture like no other product of this society. The movies reach out across cultural, technological, economic and political differences and remind us that, at our core, we all breathe the same air and live life simultaneously.
Movies, and resulting new media, are also a very accessible art form. You don’t need specialized skills or training and the heritage is new. All you need is a camera and the time it takes to visualize the world through a lens. The Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, now in it’s sixth year, celebrates not only the art that is film - but the community or artists that film and media create.
Too often, the artist’s work is an isolating task. Cinematexas has created a place for filmmakers and media artists to gather, share ideas, and receive validation in an industry to often dominated by corporate wrangling and bottom-line thinking.
For SubstanceTV, it seemed like a natural fit. We’ve committed to finding the best and bravest in film - work that often goes unnoticed in the mainstream. In Cinematexas, we found a group of international artists gathered in one place celebrating the diversity and individuality of film. In “A Short Trip Between Art and Life” SubstanceTV goes behind the scenes with several of the hard-working volunteers whose hard work and dedication make the festival possible. We also take a trip to the other side of the lens and talk to several of the International filmmakers who have found a home, and a sense of community support at the gathering.
Damon Brown is SubstanceTV’s Director of DVD Development and Producer of A Short Trip Between Art and Life.
Web Links
Find out the festival details at Cinematexas’ official website.
[ http://www.cinematexas.org/ ]
Find out more in this feature by the Austin Chronicle.
[ austinchronicle.com ]
Read this day-by-day review of Cinematexas ’99.
[ filethirteen.com ]
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