Microcinema and imeem bring you Asthmatic Kitty's Encyclopedia Asthmatica. The screening will be available from Tuesday, March 25 through Saturday, March 29th. Watch the screening on Microcinema's imeem page: microcinema.imeem.com

Wait, so what's Encyclopedia Asthmatica? Well...
In the corner of a quiet, maze-like neighborhood library, slid carefully between the cook books and dinosaur pop-ups, is the Encyclopedia Asthmatica. Though too rare to obtain a second copy, its check-out card documents a regular readership over the years, steady enough that the book is beginning to wear at the corners from its journeys through backpacks, the seats of automobiles and trains, and quiet moments in the study.

Nearly all of the Asthmatic Kitty Records' roster, and many of their friends, make an appearance somewhere on this DVD: from the playful choreography of the Think Dance Collective frolicking in shoes made of bread to the music of Half-handed Cloud, to the lovely abstraction of Sufjan Stevens' projectionist, Deborah Johnson; from the haunting and raw post-apocalypse video fuzz of live Castanets, to the crisp color footage of My Brightest Diamond at Northsix, there are visual pieces that hopscotch the chasm between the professionalism of a music-visual DVD to the rabid eccentricity of a five-copy, underground video-zine. Asthmatic Kitty is known for its creative fanbase, and so this disc also includes the winner of the Rafter YouTube video contest. The label's patent homemade aesthetic is here too, with Bunky's bizarre yet appropriate space alien video, and a selection from Liz Janes that employs found footage. The Shapes and Sizes videos turn the incidental and accidental into a hidden design, while a video from the Curtains subverts the banality of survelience video by rendering it magical.

In addition to the screening we're having a contest, the Encyclopedia Asthmatica DVD Contest. Microcinema and Asthmatic Kitty are giving away 5 signed copies of the Encyclopedia Asthmatica DVD. All you have to do to enter is to sign up for the Microcinema listserv in between March 24th and the end of the online screening on Saturday. We will announce the winnners on the MicrocinemaDVD.com site on Monday, March 31st.