Season 1 (2010/2011)

‘Leonardo’s Game of Chess’ (Dec. 2011, TRT 7 min)
‘Norwood Gets Back to His Me’ (Nov. 2011, TRT 9.5 min)
‘Anthony & Johnny’ (Oct. 2011, TRT 5.5 min)
‘Sarah’s First Day of High School’ (Jul. 2011, TRT 6.5 min)
‘Austin Changes his Name‘ (Jun. 2011, TRT 8.5 min)
‘Michael’s Roach Problem‘ (Apr. 2011, TRT 6.5 min)
‘Heather Gets Hit’ (Mar. 2011, TRT 5.5 min)
‘Harry Tells a Lie’ (Feb. 2011, TRT 4 min)
‘Felicity Is Ejected From Egypt‘ (Feb. 2011, TRT 5 min)
‘Davide’s Wet Dream’ (Nov. 2010, TRT 2 min)
‘Ralph & the Cat’ (Oct. 2010, TRT 2.75 min)
‘Patricia’s Nickel’ (Oct. 2010, TRT 2.5 min)

Please drop me a line at saskia [at] saskiawilsonbrown [dot] com with any suggestions, or hit me up on Twitter @saskiawb.

Más info:

There’s no ‘there’, there: L.A. films L.A.


Big City Forum presents a film screening curated by Saskia Wilson-Brown, Founder and co-director of Cinema Speakeasy. The evening will feature short films that examine what Los Angeles means to those that inhabit it, in a program and discussion about our public urban identity. We will be screening pieces that capture the complexity and reality of living in our de-centralized, mythologized city.


L.A. is a constantly shifting metropolis, often seemingly constructed for mass consumption by fantastical and fevered minds – with nary a glance at the rich complexity roiling beneath its shimmering skin. From gritty downtown cop dramas to technicolor Hollywood fantasies, it has been omnipresent in American celluloid, but rarely truly captured in all its complexity. It is, in short, the most filmed yet least understood megalopolis in modern American history.

Filmmakers will be on hand for a post-screening discussion about their sense of place, moderated by Saskia Wilson-Brown and Big City Forum.

Wed, Nov. 16th

Goethe Institut LA

7 – 9 pm



Still from Maya Newell's 'Two'

Seven Nine (!) filmmakers I am way excited about right now.

Michael Medaglia: Because he is about to release his short thriller Kitty Kitty on VODO (look for it on June 10th) and because he has a script he’s shopping around right now that is OFF THE HOOK good.

Maya Newell: Because this Australian filmmaker made the secret and very odd world of adult babies seem so accessible, funny and sweet with her short doc Two.

Douglas Burgdorff: Because he is so f*cking twisted it literally hurts to watch his stuff, but in the most beautiful way possible. NSFW, to the max, but watch it anyways.

Anthony Ferraro: Because he made this, this and this, and because he operates in the realm between film and art and we need more filmmakers like him.

Kaz Phillips Safer: Because she is radness incarnate, and because she made MEGAFAUNA.

Vessal Safaei, William Head, James Arneman and Katie Mitchell: Because these Aussie filmmakers are thinking beyond the obvious and delving deep into the interconnected world. Look out for ‘The Decade Project’ and their collective ‘Don’t You Have Headphones‘.

‘I Love Alaska’ — by Dutch directors Sander Plug and Lernert Engelberts – is 13 short episodes chronicling the life of AOL user #71139 through her search queries, which were inadvertently released on the internet when AOL mistakenly published the private search history of 650,000 of its users. It’s really a fascinating watch (or rather, listen: It’s mostly VO).

Watch the episodes here.

Synopsis: I Love Alaska tells the true and heartbreaking search history of User #711391. As the the voice-over reads out the search queries entered into AOL’s search engine over a 3 month period, an image emerges of a somewhat obese religious woman from Houston, Texas, who is looking for a way to rejuvenate her sex life. In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction, and dreams of a new life in Alaska.

Chalk it up to filmmaker Gary Hustwit to keep up his job as the chronicler par extaordinaire of society’s current passions in design and design discourse.

His deep look into a typeface resulted in his 2007 documentary Helvetica. In the age of the iPhone, he turned to industrial and object design (and in so doing produced a nice commentary on the fetishization of design objects) in Objectified. Now he’s tackling urban design- or as he puts it ‘the design of cities’. This, to my view, must be the most complex of his subjects thus far, and I am really excited to see how Urbanized turns out.

From his site:

“The third documentary in this trilogy is about the design of cities.Urbanized looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design, featuring some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers. Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. But while some cities are experiencing explosive growth, others are shrinking. The challenges of balancing housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental policy are fast becoming universal concerns. Yet much of the dialogue on these issues is disconnected from the public domain.

Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren’t created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized will frame a global discussion on the future of cities.

Urbanized is currently in production and will premiere in 2011. We’ll be releasing more details about the cities, projects, and people featured in the film in the next few months, along with a proper site. Once again I’ve teamed up with cinematographer Luke Geissbuhler, and I hope you’ll follow along as we complete the film and finish this third exploration into the role of design in our lives.”

Track the project here on his site: http://www.urbanizedfilm.com/

And here on his twitter profile: http://twitter.com/gary_hustwit

If you have any questions, suggestions, addendums, please email me at saskia@saskiawilsonbrown.com.