Milwaukee Underground Film Festival

For the past eleven years a group of students and instructors from UWM’s Film Department have quietly been broadening the cinematic horizons for area moviegoers with the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, showcasing artistic, experimental and innovative films and short videos from Milwaukee and far beyond. “Originally, the festival started out as a class and later became a student organization,” explains Andrew Gralton, a film student and one of the festival’s organizers. “The torch has sort of been passed to different instructors from year to year”.

This year’s instructor is Ross Nugent, who assists the class in planning, programming, and overseeing the festival from beginning to end. “He’s our fearless leader,” jokes Gralton, “but he definitely isn’t the hand holding type! He leaves the majority of the work up to us to make this thing happen.”

Gralton says he appreciates the festival for the opportunities it provides to burgeoning filmmakers. “As opposed to a lot of classes where you’re just doing assignments to get a grade, this is something that exists outside of school. It’s a great chance for students to connect their educational experience with the outside world.”

That “outside world” goes quite a ways. Stretching across the U.S. and Canada and as far as Iceland and Japan, a wide range of international and national filmmakers will be shown. Even though Gralton and his fellow film students select the films, they do not screen their own pieces throughout the juried festival in an effort to keep things fair and open. “We have work from a variety of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and points in their careers,” said Gralton. A number of local filmmakers will be presented as well. “There’s a lot of talent in this city,“ Gralton affirms, “and we’re happy to be an avenue for those makers to get their work screened.”

The films and videos being screened during the three-day festival are as diverse as their creators. Chicago-based filmmaker Jodie Mack’s Posthaste Perennial Pattern pulls the viewer into a hypnotic trance with simple yet intriguing floral and paisley patterns. Gerard Freres Ribera’s The Homogenics collages multiple episodes of 1960’s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show to illustrate how uniformity and standardization can often be hilariously absurd. In Icelander Marianna Milhorat’s L’Internationale, strange factories and geothermal stations seem to foretell of a bleak and perhaps a “not-too-distant” catastrophic future. A high point of the is sure to be Brooklyn filmmaker Sean Hanley’s 2010 film Hindsight, a touching and masterfully shot homage to the director’s hometown. The film is definitely an impressive success for the young director.

For Gralton, working on the festival is definitely rewarding. “We get so much out of it … just to see and discuss all the work that comes in and learning to working together is a beneficial educational experience. I would love to do more programming in the future!”

The Milwaukee Underground Film Festival runs May 6-8, with screenings at various locations:

May 6 — 7 p.m. at the Union Theatre (2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.)

May 7 — 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts (839 S. 5th St.)

May 8 — 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.  at the Kenilworth Building (4th floor, 1925 E Kenilworth Pl.)

All screenings are free and open to the public. For more information please visit www.filmmilwaukee.org.