FILM

Co-presented with the Houston Cinema Arts Society, and in conjunction with the 2010 Cinema Arts Festival Houston, Aurora is pleased to welcome the Green cousins to Houston. How can two such talented filmmakers be in the same family? Films by Sam Green, Brent Green, and live music by the Quavers* with special guests Brendan Canty (Fugazi) and John Michael Swartz will be presented over three festival nights. Utopia in Four Movements with directors Sam Green and Dave Cerf, accompanied by the Quavers presented Friday at 6:45pm and Saturday at 5:30pm.

With a powerful sense of poetry, Utopia in Four Movements uses the collective experience of cinema to explore the battered state of the utopian impulse at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

In this "live documentary," filmmaker Sam Green cues images and narrates in person while sound designer/musician Dave Cerf and the Quavers perform the soundtrack. From the establishment of a man-made language designed to end war and cultural conflict and the undying optimism of an American exile in Cuba, to the current economic boom in China, Green and Cerf sift through the history of the utopian impulse to seek, with their audiences, ways to build a vision of the future based on humankind's noblest impulses.

Sam Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker. His feature The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His other award-winning documentaries include lot 63, grave c, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, N-Judah 5:30, and Pie Fight '69. His work has won awards and been featured in many festivals, among them Sundance, the London Film Festival, and Locarno, where he won the Critics Choice Award. Green has received grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Creative Capital Foundations, and the NEA. He got his master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Green currently teaches at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Brooklyn band, The Quavers are T. Griffin, Catherine McRae and Dennis Cronin. They coax a luminous sound out of decayed samplers, walkmans, vibraphonette, footpedal loopers, tape echo violin and homespun harmonies. In addition to their CD Lit By Your Phone they've collaborated on dozens of film scores, plays, live soundtracks and music projects with artists as diverse as Patti Smith, Anne Bogart, Jem Cohen, Vic Chesnutt, Michael Almereyda, Tom Verlaine, DJ/Rupture and members of godspeed you! black emperor.

Visit www.cinemartsociety.org  for complete schedule and details.