Maine Microcinema is a cinema/screening series dedicated to promoting local and regional video and filmmaking in the Pine Tree State. Maine Micro Cinema (MMC) continues to be a popular Thursday night attraction for downtown Lewiston, where independent and Maine-based artists share their work in the warm and intimate venue known as She Doesn’t Like Guthries. As images dance on the swaying home-built projection screen, audience members are invited to laugh, cry, and probe each night’s guest director with questions and reactions to the work. MMc is produced by Craig Saddlemire and Colin Kelley.
Two exciting screenings are approaching the horizon for MMC this summer. The first is a night dedicated to the work of Georg Koszulinski (that’s right, there’s no “e” on the end of Georg), and will begin at 7:30pm on Thursday, June 6th. Georg has produced over 20 narrative, documentary, and avant-garde works, including The Search for Norumbega, which is truly about the first Westernized perceptions of our beloved state of Maine. On the earliest European maps of North America, the unexplored region of present-day Maine was often labeled “Norumbega.” The fabled land was said to be hidden within this vast wilderness, and numerous cartographies placed Norumbega along Maine’s Penobscot River. But did Norumbega ever actually exist, or was it simply a European projection onto an unknown North American landscape—the desire to imagine a space divorced from the problems of European history? If Norumbega was anything more than a mythologized landscape, the limits of knowledge fail to prove its existence. Perhaps the poetic capabilities of the moving image will manifest an alternative future geography—a Norumbega that exists beyond the limits of history, cartography, and nationality. In honor of Georg’s work, the curators of Maine Micro Cinema briefly considered changing the series’ name to Norumbega Micro Cinema, but ultimately decided against it. In addition to The Search, Georg will present other award winning films that he will accompany with a live guitar soundtrack. More information about Georg’s work is available at http://www.substreamfilms.com/.
The second screening will take place at 7:30pm on July 11th, 2013, and will feature the latest documentary by local videomaker and MMC curator, Craig Saddlemire. Household: Four Stories of Kinship and Curiosity, is an experimental ethnography which challenges viewers to examine their own naturalized feelings and ideas about what constitutes a “family.”