The 27th Annual Black Maria Film Festival selected P.R. and it was awarded a Juror’s Citation Prize. The Black Maria is a long-running international experimental film and video festival with tour dates throughout the US.
The Black Maria Film Festival seeks diverse, expressive, and passionate short films and videos by independent makers. The Festival is named after Thomas Edison’s motion picture studio, and is known for its support of spirited, cutting edge, and otherwise singular film and video. The Black Maria is committed to works that explore the potential of the medium to illuminate, provoke, enrich, and engage viewers. Imaginative and revelatory films and videos which provide insight into the human condition and political, social, and environmental issues, as well as the lives of people with disabilities, or which investigate the aesthetic potential and eschew obvious conventions of the medium are also sought by the festival.
Jurors included:
Mary Fessenden, Director, Cornell Cinema
Richard Herskowitz, Director, Virginia Film Festival
Cara Longo, Manager – Acquisition & Programming, Sundance Channel
Peggy Parsons, Curator of Film, The National Gallery of Art
The printed catalogue had this to say about my animation:
This biting work is a conceptual deconstruction of an ill-considered pronouncement by a noted televangelist. The artist “metamorphizes†one icon into another as he turns media-driven culture against itself. P.R. is a compact, yet effective protest against right-wing reactionary thinking. Using a simple trope of animation, Bryan Leister finds a visual expression for the hypocrisies of interventionist rhetoric about foreign extremism.
The Festival tours 60 cinematheques, colleges, museums, libraries, and community organizations, from Maine to California and Alaska to Florida, reaching over 20 states across the USA.