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The
pain of betrayal, the trauma of rape, the cut of a blade....
The two films in this program lay it
all bare in some of the most riveting and emotionally intense
new work produced in recent years.
Jennifer Reeves' *Chronic* is the story of Gretchen, a young
woman who began at an early age
using self-mutilation as a strategy to get beyond the pain of
her everyday life.
Employing both scripted and documentary
footage as well as a number of optical printing techniques
and different film stocks, *Chronic* presents
a surrealistic narrative of Gretchen's childhood in Ohio
and her time in a mental institution as a teenager. Visceral
and raw, this is a film that breaks
down the boundaries between an inner emotional life and the social
world that surrounds it.
Next,
girl-buddy action film meets psychedelic cinema in *Groove on
a Stanley Knife*,
a fast-paced film marked by colors and images
as vivid and intense as the emotions they evoke.
Stef and Tammy are best friends on the run
from crack dealers in the north of England.
Forced to hide out in an abandoned public
toilet until things cool down,
they are left together with only a pack of
skittles and the blade of a stanley knife between them
to confront the shocking and violent history
of their first meeting,
and to come to terms with each other over Stef's love for women
and Tammy's homophobia.
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