When They’re Bad, They’re Better:
The 9th New York Underground Film Festival

Ioannis Mookas
The Independent Film & Video Magazine
July/August 2002
https://www.proquest.com/docview/218637245?sourcetype=Trade%20Journals

Excerpt:

Less a film festival as we know one to be than a blazing Catherine Wheel that rolls over downtown Manhattan every spring, disgorging cinematic fireworks and leaving audiences gasping in its wake, the New York Underground Film Festival clocked its ninth year with a wicked vengeance. Still true to its trashy origins, NYUFF’s programming has also grown increasingly sophisticated over the past three or four years, as the festival has emerged at the forefront of an international media scene encompassing other underground festivals throughout North America.

[…]

Several of NYUFF’s most appealing shows were produced by guest curators like… “Keep In Touch“, curated by Astria Suparak and Lauren Cornell, featured such highlights as Jacqueline Goss’s THE 100TH UNDONE, a whip-smart, unsettling and oddly touching reflection on the genome, cloning advances, and the “post-human” future. Seth Price’s hilarious TRIUMF deflates American frontier mythology and macho bluster with an inspired rant, while its picture-perfect autumnal tableau sports the most vivid foliage to be found this side of a Sirk melodrama. Other selections by Leslie Thornton, Stephanie Barber, and Zakery Weiss attested to the curators’ gossamer touch with heavyweight artists and themes.
[…]

NYUFF’s expansive, highly varied programming defies easy synoptic summary, but taken together its 2002 installment constitutes an exemplary cultural intervention into our present reactionary climate. The festival’s ninth edition also finished at something of a crossroads, poised to gain even greater currency yet faced by the challenge of reconciling newfound statures with an authentic connection to its grassroots base. NYUFF has moved from strength to strength, however, and its continued ability to leverage critical attention for “marginal” film- and videomakers while satisfying its rapt, ribald audiences bodes well for the festival and for the independent media field.

Read the full article at: https://www.proquest.com/docview/218637245?sourcetype=Trade%20Journals