Announcing XOXO Film
On Saturday night at XOXO, starting at 7pm until 1am, we’re bringing a selection of six uniquely independent feature-length films and short videos to the top floor of the YU Contemporary.
Like with XOXO Music, Tabletop and Arcade, nearly all the creators of these independent works will be at XOXO in person, to screen their work and talk about how it was made.
Incredibly, four out of these six selections are still unreleased and their creators are sharing work-in-progress footage with us at XOXO for the very first time.
So grab your popcorn, sit back, and enjoy!
Arcade: The Last Night at Chinatown Fair
In their upcoming documentary, Brooklyn-based filmmakers Kurt Vincent and Irene Chen follow the final days of Chinatown Fair, the last surviving arcade in New York City. For over five decades, this gritty, dingy building in Chinatown withstood the near-death of the arcade industry by fostering a community of competitive gamers. In the process, they created a safe environment for tolerance and diversity in a very unlikely place. Both filmmakers join us for an exclusive work-in-progress cut of their Kickstarter-funded film.
Percussive Maintenance
SF-based animator Duncan Robson is a past XOXO attendee responsible for some of the best supercuts ever—Let’s Enhance, which pokes fun at the zoom-in-and-enhance trope from TV and film, and Three Point Landing, the cliche landing position for every action star ever. He’s bringing his newest remix, “Percussive Maintenance,” to XOXO before unleashing it on the Internet.
STRIPPED
Webcomic creator Dave Kellett and cinematographer Frederick Schroeder teamed up to make STRIPPED, a love letter to the comic strip that brings together the world’s best cartoonists to talk about the art form they love and how it’s changed as newspapers die. Over 90 interviews were conducted with modern webcomics giants and print comics legends, including the first ever audio interview with Calvin & Hobbes’ Bill Watterson. The film raised over $184,000 from 5,342 backers across two Kickstarter projects, and we’ll get an inside look at their development process as they share early clips from the work-in-progress film.
This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory
Kirby Ferguson’s Everything Is A Remix is essential viewing for any fan of remix culture, an an acclaimed four-part series about creativity and invention in the Internet age. His followup, This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory, is a departure from his past work—a multipart series explaining the ideas and events that shaped the modern political landscape in the United States. Kirby will share the first few minutes from this bold new work with us, and talk about why he’s taken on such a difficult subject.
Twelve Tones
SF-based mathemusician Vi Hart speaks at XOXO on Sunday, but we thought it’d be crazy not to take advantage of her presence in Portland to screen Twelve Tones, her tour-de-force video released on YouTube in June. It’s a mind-expanding look at atonal music, creativity and constraints, over a year in the making. Afterwards, Vi joins us onstage to answer your questions about her process.
Computer Chess
It’s a midnight movie, XOXO-style! Austin-based director Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess is a pseudo-documentary set in the early 1980s, following a group of chess software programmers as they compete in a weekend-long tournament and try to change the future. Shot entirely in black-and-white with vintage Sony AVC 3260 tube-powered videocameras, the film uses heavily-improvised dialogue with several real-life coders, including game designer Wiley Wiggins and University of Chicago CS professor Gordon Kindlmann. The result is a deeply weird film that never could have been made in Hollywood, independently funded with the support of 191 backers through USA Projects.
XOXO Film, like all our evening events, is open to all badgeholders. See you there!