Part of The Rural Route Film Festival
Saturday, August 6, 2011, 5:00 p.m.

Dir. Danny Wilcox Frazier. 2010, 30 mins.

The Midwestern family farm has been choked by industrialized agriculture and replanted with subdivisions. A shifting economy, combined with an old-fashioned lifestyle that weakens each generation, is forever altering the landscape. Carrying his camera, Frazier walks Iowa’s gravel roads, gets his feet wet in a milking barn, and pulls up a stool in a small-town bar. What results is a complex portrait of a well-loved American landscape at a time of enormous cultural change.

Muskrat John
Dir. Warner Wada. 2009, 30 mins. Before the Turnpike or Giants Stadium, Jersey City native Johnny Rohweder fished, hunted, and trapped in the New Jersey Meadowlands, site of Springsteen lyrics and Tony Soprano’s cigar-fueled Escalade rambles, and home once to thousands of pheasants, blue crabs, and muskrats.

Empty Cache
Dir. Michael Walsh. 2010, 7 mins. Archival footage of Alaskan big game hunts is experimentally woven together, creating an ironic, eerie aura of humans hunting for the mount, not for the meat.

A Child’s Christmas in Texas
Dir. Jessica Gardner. 2010, 16 mins. This dreamy recollection of Christmases past with a sinister twist is based on William Browning Spencer’s award-winning short story “A Child’s Christmas in Florida.”

We Are Not What They Say We Are
Dirs./Prods. Olivia Walker, Sherry Edwards, Sam Isaacs, Maurice Isaacs, Ashton Rose Edwards, Martin Walker. 2010, 13 mins. Isaacs and Edwards star as two young people on the tough road to adult life with the extra challenges that face them as teenage Romany Gypsies. While Jimmy, a talented road jockey, is deciding how to stand up to school bullies, Mary wonders how she can fulfill her dreams of being a singer, and what will happen if she gets married.

Free with Museum admission