Each year, The Southwest Alternate Media Project, a Houston-based nonprofit group that helps fund independent film and video work, announces 10 recipients of its Independent Production Fund Awards. This year, two of the 10 winners of the $37,500 grants hailed from the Dallas area. One is Jennifer Hoffecker, an associate professor of visual art and video at UTD, whose poetic personal essays have screened at FOCUS '94 and the Dallas Video Festival. She'll use her grant to produce a visual essay called "Normal." The work is about a mildly disabled person trying to get by. It was inspired both by the perseverance of a young cousin of Hoffecker's who was born with a heart defect and the artist's own struggles with rheumatoid arthritis.
The other local winner was Mitch Geller, an assistant professor of art at UTA. Geller is a recent migrant from New York whose free-form, abstract, political works have been exhibited in festivals both here and abroad. He'll use his grant to finish a complicated abstract video work called TexChrisT. "The title is an acronym for a fictional Bible belt radio station," Geller says. "It deals with the perception and images of the American West versus what the West is really like, and how all of that relates with religion and mass murder." With a score by Trent Reznor, no doubt.
Trivia contest: The first three callers who leave the right answers at 757-8449 win a pass to an advance screening of the Michael Douglas-Demi Moore imperiled-white-guy thriller Disclosure. Tell Rushes what movie contains the following line of dialogue and name the actor who uttered the words: "If I'd have wanted to cast my feelings into words, I'd have memorized the Song of Solomon."
--Matt Zoller Seitz
