SUNDAY, April 4

About the Festival Guests

Niku Arbabi has been organizing the Ms. Films Festival since volunteering at the first event in 2001, an offshoot of the Flicker Film Festival. She compiled the Down, Dirty & DIY Guide to Film and Video with Jen Ashlock and Joyce Ventimiglia and has curated film series for the University of Minnesota’s Bijou Theater, for Duke’s Screen/Society and for various events in the Triangle. Arbabi currently curates the ScreenArts film series for the Communication Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Skip Elsheimer spends most of his time collecting, archiving and showing a collection of over 14,000 16mm educational films under the name A/V Geeks. He presents monthly themed shows – such as “Declassified,” a collection of military training and recruiting films and “Televised Teen Traumas,” a showcase of ABC Afterschool Specials – in his home base, the Raleigh-Durham, NC area. Elsheimer has taken his shows on the road to Houston’s Aurora Picture Show, Austin’s Alamo Cinema, Boston’s Coolidge Cinema, Portland’s Clinton Street Theater and New York’s American Museum of the Moving Image, where he screened an eight-show retrospective.

Vermont filmmaker John O’Brien has produced a trilogy of films over an 11-year period that focus on his community – the village of Tunbridge – and the ways in which it reacts to the outside world of city-slickers, slippery politicians and pastorally-deluded yuppies. His most recent, "Nosey Parker," was completed in 2003. "Vermont is for Lovers" played the first James River Film Festival in 1994 and O’Brien visited Richmond in ’98 with his surprise hit, "Man With a Plan." When not making films, O’Brien devotes considerable energies to his sheep farm.

Video artist Bob Paris has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Image Forum Festival in Tokyo and Documenta IX in Germany and his documentaries have aired on public television. He was one of the editors on Emmy-winner Marlon Riggs’ "Black Is, Black Ain’t" and scripted episodes for the sci-fi series Ice Planet. He recently completed Disturbance, a multi-projected video installation that explores the link between social disaster and public spectacle via the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Paris currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Kinetic Imaging Department.

Los Angeles-based producer/director Mel Stuart is a veteran of American television and screen, from directing the “Welcome Back Kotter” TV series for ABC to directing two of the great cult films to emerge from the early ’70s – the incredibly psychedelic "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and "Wattstax," a documentary of a Los Angeles R&B festival dubbed the “Black Woodstock.” More recently, Stuart completed "Man Ray: Prophet of the Avant-Garde" for public television’s “American Masters” series.

Richmond filmmaker David Williams produced two feature films in the 1990s ("Lillian" and "Thirteen") that made the festival circuit and garnered enthusiastic reviews from the likes of Roger Ebert. In both films, the featured players (as themselves) were African-American women, and both made ready use of friends and acquaintances and Richmond settings. His latest project, "Long Art" (2003), is a bit of a departure – a documentary on three working artists as they prepare for upcoming exhibitions. Williams teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Photography and Film Department.