Microcinema DVDs - Wholphin Issue Three

The third issue of Wholphin will feature the early, rediscovered work of Alexander Payne and Dennis Hopper; new-found talent from abroad, including Jonas Odell and Alice Winocour; the strangest Japanese film we've ever seen, from the three-man directing team Naisu No Mori; a documentary about a thirteen-year-old Yemeni girl who refuses to wear her veil; and "The Popcorn Effect" of trap-jaw ants.

This issue will also include a bonus disc featuring Part Two: "The Phantom Victory" of Adam Curtis's powerful documentary, The Power of Nightmares.

12 films. 162 minutes.

Includes bonus disk! 40 pages of interviews and more.
Further Information:

Liner Notes:
WALLEYBALL: “YEAH YEAH, WE SPEAK ENGLIGH. JUST SERVE.”

Directed by Wholphin
Edited by Encyclopedia Pictura
U.S., 2006

A human-rights lawyer told us we probably wouldn't get within a mile of the wall. Even if we did, she said, it would likely be double of triple-fenced with razor wire, not to mention patrolled by trigger-happy Neanderthals.

The carload full of players we'd recruited to share this historic moment got a late start and, after discussing the likelihood of being tagged in the head by a rubber bullet and/or arrested, bailed. We'd heard that sending anything across international borders without clearing customs could result in a felony charge, which meant that after three hits of the ball we'd all be subject to mandatory life imprisonment under California's three-strikes law.

At the border we held up our volleyball and called out the Tijuanans we could see through the slats in the unfinished wall: "Pelota?" Before we could remember the world for "play," a kid on the other side said, "Yeah yeah, we speak perfect English. Just serve." And so, as six half-curious members of the border patrol watched through binoculars from the hill above, we did.

--Brent Hoff

FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT

Special Bonus Interview with the directing team, Naisu No Mori (Ishii, Miki and ANIKI)

Q: How did the collaboration between your co-directors work? Did each of you take a section or did you all work on all sections?

Ishii (I): We are all doing whatever we like. Especially Aniki is the one doing what pleases him the most.

ANIKI (A): No way, not just me, everyone is doing what we darn well please.

I: We did not split our jobs or anything did we?

Miki (M): We all did whatever we wanted to do, and then gave it consistency to it afterwards. We talked about how we would combine the stories afterwards. The reason why we started this was because we wanted to do something that we liked; however if it was just that, the film would be just a compilation of shorts films. So we still wanted to do whatever we wanted to do the most, but at the same time make it into one connected film.

I: If we make rules such as limiting the piece down to certain amount of minutes, it becomes producer driven. Even if we are told that the piece should be 20 min., the piece that you want to make might not be 20 min., so it was like, who cares about stuff like that! That was our mentality.

M: The overall impression was that we want to give it some compassion, human warmth throughout the whole entire film.

I: Humanity = Downtown Neighborhood sitcomish (From Ai: Downtown Tokyo is often depicted as story with a human touch, do you know the Tora-san series? If you can find the right word to explain it please change it) that's what I was aiming for.

M: Dance & Music was Aniki's theme. And the kind of grotesque gags and jokes are mine.

I: The ones you want to grunt "Woo, gross..." on a physiological level are usually yours.

M: The characters appear and interwine through out all the stories, so it might be confusing, but that would be the basic distinction among us.

Q: The visual effects are astounding. How did you achieve the "small-headed bloodsucker" effect?

A: Thank you very much. The Tamotsu Yamada effects was made possible by first creating a special effects plastic art figure. After it was shot with that, the face of the actor was morphed on to it with CGI. The sticks that were used to move the figure was erased at the post production stage.

Q: Are you willing to explain the meaning of the name stamp?

A: In Japan, name stamps are very commonly used in place of a signature. For contracts, we often use name stamps instead of signatures. So we thought it would be funny that something like a name stamp came out in that situation. There is no deep meaning to it.

Q: I've seen reviewers describe this film as experimental or expressionistic, but it seems to me to be less of a surreal fantasy than a literal translation of a traumatic sexual experience as perceived by a child. Are either of us close to right?

A: Thank you. We really did not give it much thought and just created stuff that just popped in our minds. We really did not think things through that deeply. All we did was enjoyed the entire process.

Q: My assistant is curious to know what is the most vivid dream you have ever had?

I: For some reason, I was living in a castle full of reason, I was living in a castle full of mice. We all were supposed to protect the castle from a gigantic broomstick ghost. I was the head of the strategic department, and fought with together with all the mice. I saw this dream two nights in a row, so I remember this clearly.

M: Ishii-san and Aniki were taking a bath with all these beautiful women from all around the world. But myself being a stoic guy decide not to join, and go outside, but while I am climbing up the hill and come to this huge front gate, I regret to myself, "I should have gone inside the tub..."

A: I become a bubble in the middle of space. I go back and forth from ballooning up to shrinking to a smaller size, so it was a ticklish dream. (I used to see this dream a lot between first grade to third grade.)

Q: What is the best film you have seen this year?

I: It is not a film, but there is a Japanese Animation DVD series "Aim to the Top 2 (Japanese title: Top Wo Nerae)" Vol. 1-6 (Produced by GAINAX). This series quite amazing!!

M: I also think it's "Aim to the Top 2" It is just super great. If you watch "Aim to the Top" and then "Aim to the Top 2." It's even more amazing.

A: I can not decide on a favorite, so the film that I saw most recently favorite, so the film that I saw most recently was Mikio Naruse's "When a Woman Ascends the Stairs"

And Coming Soon: A full CG version of the Mole Brothers (5 eps of 7min)!

Director Bios

Khadija Al-Salami

Khadija Al-Salami, Yemen's first female filmmaker, has made some twenty documentaries for various TV stations in France and Yemen. With her husband, she has written a book, The Tears of Sheba, about her experiences growing up in Yemen. Currently, she occupies the posts of Press Counselor and Director of the Communication Center at the Embassy of Yemen in Paris.

Arnoldo Garcia

Arnoldo Garcia is a Senior Program Associate at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 1986, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) works to promote just immigration and refugee policies in the United States. Arnoldo is the editor of Network News, NNIRR's newsmagazine, and heads up NNIRR's Justice, Equality & Human Rights Program, which monitors and documents immigration-law-enforcement abuses and human-rights violations. For additional information about the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights, please visit www.nnirr.org.

Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas in 1936. He has been in over 140 television shows and has starred in over 150 films, including Rebel Without A Cause, Giant, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, and Speed. The classic Easy Rider won him "Best New Director" at the Cannes Film Festival and he received the prestigious CIDALC award at the Venice Film Festival for The Last Movie (1971). In June of 2004, he became Chair of the CineVegas Film Festival. In addition to acting and directing, Hopper is a noted photographer and painter. He began painting on his family farm in Kansas, but it wasn't until 1961, when his first wife gave him the "life-changing" gift of a Nikon camera, that his talent for photography began to emerge. Today, Hopper's art has been exhibited internationally in Italy, France, Japan, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Spain, as well as in major cities across the U.S. Hopper is a father of four.

Carson Mell

Arizona native Carson Mell lives in Hollywood, California without a wife or an animal. He is currently developing his illustrated novel, "Saguaro," into a feature film and working on a variety of short film projects. You can see more of his work and purchase a copy of the book at www.carsonmell.com.

Naisu No Mori

ANIKI is the most well-known commercial director in Japan; his honors include the ACC Asia Pacific Advertising Award. His feature-film directorial debut, Custom Made 10.30, was releases in Japan in October 2005. He is also a vinyl-record collector, and was the music supervisor in Katsuhito Ishii's Taste of Tea.

Katsuhito Ishii began directing television commercials in 1992, for which he won several prestigious awards. This film Taste of Tea (2004) was the opening night film for Cannes Director's Fortnight at the 2004 Entrevues Film Festival in France. Ishii also contributed to the animated sequence in Kill Bill: Volume One.

Shunichiro Miki is known for his out-of this-world commercials and music videos; his series of Fanta soda ads is the most renowned. He has won various awards for his innovative commercial campaigns for Cannes, Clio, and IBA. Miki has also acted in Katsuhito Ishii's Taste of Tea, and plays the taller of the mole brother in Funky Forest The First Contact.

Jonas Odell

Jonas Odell is one of the founders of Filmtecknarna. He specializes in making films by mixing live action and various mixed media animation techniques. He has also scripted, co-scripted and written music to a number of the studio's productions. Jonas has directed music videos for Erasure, Goldfrapp, Audiobullys, and Franz Ferdinand; for the Franz Ferdinand video, he received a breakthrough video of the year award at the 2004 MTV Music Awards, as well as a Grammy nomination. His films include the short films Revolver (1993) and Otto (1997) and his latest piece, Family & Friends.

Bob Odenkirk

Bob Odenkirk did Mr. Show, and now he's directing films and trying like hell to do good work. Pathetic. www.bobanddavid.com

Alexander Payne

Alexander Payne was born in Rome, the son of a sculptor father and professor mother, and was raised largely in Scotland and Benin. He left Harvard after two years to work as a longshoreman, a bus driver, a pool man and a translator. A lifelong asthmatic, he moved to Nebraska for the air but found himself so fascinated by rituals and customs on the plains that he picked up a movie camera as a way of documenting them before they vanished forever. After four feature films, he is currently at work on his second volume of poetry. His first, Shadings and Shadowings, was published in 1991.

Daren Rabinovitch

Daren Rabinovitch is an artist living in San Francisco. Tactical Advantage is his first film.

Scientist Bios

Joe Baio received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley, and currently works in the Patek lab as a research assistant and laboratory manager.

Brian L. Fisher has published research on ants since 1986; his specialty within entomology is the diversity and evolution of ants. His current research centers on Madagascar, where he initiated the Biodiversity Center Project in collaboration with Park Tsimbazaza in 1999. For the last sic years, he has been the lead scientist on the National Science Foundation-funded arthropod inventory of Madagascar project. He has published over fifty pee-reviewed articles in scholarly journals and books, and he is currently Associate Curator and Chairman of Entomology at the California Academy of Sciences and adjunct research professor of biology at both the University of California at Berkeley and at San Francisco State University.

Sheila Patek attended Harvard University for her undergraduate work, continued to Duke University for her PhD and completed her training with a Miller postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley. In 2004, she joined the Integrative Biology department at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. Her lab currently focuses on the interface between physics, behavior, and evolution to understand the fascinating diversity of fast animal movements and animal communication systems.

Andrew V. Suarez grew up near Chicago, and got his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He then moved to California for ten years where he completed a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a few years of research at the University of Illinois in 2003, as faculty. While Andy is generally interested in many aspects of ecology, evolution and animal behavior, he is passionate about the study of ants.

Alice Winocour

Alice Winocour graduated from La Femis French national film school (screenplay department). She won the Junior Trophy in 2004 for the best Sopadin screenplay with Augustine. The same year, she wrote and directed Kitchen, her first short film, which played at Cannes.

David and Nathan Zellner

David and Nathan Zellner are filmmaking siblings based out of Austin, TX. They've been enraptured with cinema since a young age, when a chance encounter abroad led to being cast as Featured Extras in Pasolini's coming of age drama, Salo. During the 1980's they served as personal videographers for music legend Chuck Berry, further solidifying their career path of choice. Along with an assortment of short films and music videos they've made two features, Plastic Utopia (1998) and Frontier (2002), which are available on DVD. Their work has screened at festivals internationally, though there's still quite a bit of ground to cover. www.FortHQ.com