Xan aranda mormon movie island

Narrative Shorts, Program 1

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 at 9PM

The Dinner Table by Nathan Williams                                                                                                              (Seattle, WA)
                                                                                                                                                   Changes within a family are witnessed in glimpses at their dinner table.

Deserters by Erik LeDrew                                                                                                                             (Seattle, WA)
                                                                                                                                                               A traumatized vet called to report for deployment goes AWOL. His lover and fellow soldier tries to convince him not to bail: Love and War don’t mix.

Madman’s Diary by Alexander Tsway                                                                                                             (Sammamish, WA)                                                                                                                                                 
The ever-growing addiction of online gaming has taken over the lives and incomes of Chinese Generation X teens.

Bad Penny by Linas Phillips                                                                                                                         (Seattle, WA)
                                                                                                                                                Shawnsey, Barry’s childhood friend, is staying at Barry’s New York City apartment. Barry has a date and needs Shawnsey to leave for the evening, but Shawnsey has a different plan.

Wish by Norman Tumlova                                                                                                                 

“In the spring of 2011, at the age of 18, my brother Matthew got his first real girlfriend,” says the 17-year-old protagonist of “The Unspeakable Act” in voiceover as we see her riding her bike down leafy, idyllic streets in Brooklyn. “I had somehow thought that he and I had an unspoken agreement that we belonged to each other. Which was really pretty stupid of me.”

She’s hung up on her brother. In the wrong way. And she wants to broach “the i-word,” as she puts it. “But that concept doesn’t go over so well with Matthew.”

Nothing ever happens. But her feelings are sincere. And I’m not sure New York-based filmmaker Dan Sallitt could have pulled off such an off-putting premise without a magnetic actress such as Tallie Medel in the role. She has big doleful eyes and wears her dark hair in a shag. She is small but solidly built — a force to be reckoned with, as her brother says at one point.

The film opens at the Siskel Film Center this week with Sallitt (who is both the film’s screenwriter and director) in town for post-show discussions Friday and Saturday. When I spoke with him earlier this week, I asked how he landed on such a taboo subject.

“That’s always a hard question,” he said. “You get some crazy ideas that do not necessarily have anything to do with art. They just kind of fly through your head. And then, whichever one gives you a lot of interesting stuff to play with, sticks.”

He didn’t initially intend to make a movie about incest. “And I didn’t, in any psychological or sociological sense.

“The fact that this girl has this complete lack of concern for society’s moral code — she takes it into account in a practical sense, but it really never bothers her that what she wanted was something that was completely disapproved of all around — that generated a whole lot of notes and a whole lot of pos

Inspiration is a fragile thing — an infant’s frank gaze, a thought-provoking conversation, the last book you read.

We spoke to three women in the world of fine arts about what moves them to create.

Claire Sherman: It’s all in the experiment

During a road trip with her husband through the Southwest, Claire Sherman pointed a camera out her car window and took a blurry image of the bleached landscape whizzing past, the kind of impromptu picture that also captures a highway sign and a bit of the dashboard.

Sherman, a landscape painter, dismissed it at the time; it was one of dozens of photos she’d taken on the trip in search of subject matter for future work, and not a very good one. Upon returning to her New York studio, she focused on creating drawings from the more calculated shots — but found they were too iconic, too recognizable as how the Southwest should look, and nothing seemed to work.

It wasn’t until she sketched from the blurry photo that an abstract mound of pale brush strokes started to come together, eventually becoming a 6-by-7-foot oil painting she called ‘‘Butte.”

“I wanted to go after something more strange,” Sherman said. “I found it in the image that was taken by chance.”

For Sherman, 30, who is represented by the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, inspiration does not come as an “aha” moment, but evolves, through trial and error, over time.

“I can’t just look at something and know that it will make an interesting painting,” said Sherman, an Oberlin, Ohio, native and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “It’s the experiment that helps me come up with a new idea.”

Sherman’s work, large-scale canvases of boulders or caves or snowy trees, explores contemporary notions of landscapes, noting the failures of their heroic past.

Traveling to find images to work from, Sherman finds that usu