Not your mother's film festival
Hi Mom! at eight

Hi Mom! Film Fest gets serious while retaining its low-fi irreverence in its eighth year running, and wise relocating on this go-round to a spot on the calendar farther away from Full Frame and Riverrun, Chapel Hill / Carrboro's Hi Mom! Film Fest continues to strengthen its programming. After its undergraduate origins, the festival is steadily building its reputation on the international experimental film scene, with uncommonly strong entries from France leading the way. As always, the festival operates as a collective undertaking, with the names of Matt Hedt, !an Krabacher, Tom Laney and Randy Bullock coming up most frequently as key organizers…

The festival's informative program notes include a lengthy interview with one Jean-Gabriel Périot, a Paris filmmaker who comes highly rated by those in the know. Hedt describes Périot  as a "camera-less filmmaker, one who works with found footage and does his creation in the editing process. One of Périot's films, called Dies Irae, will be seen at Friday night's outdoor screening at the Rosemary Street parking garage. It's an intoxicatingly beautiful and ominous work: As diaphanous as its title, Dies lrae is a 10-minute film that consists of 6,000-8,000 still photographs that Périot scavenged from the Internet over a period of several months. Périot, a young filmmaker with an articulate interest in European and American social histories, has another film in the fest that Hedt calls "extremely powerful, giving us a grand portrait of humanity." Titled We are Winning Don't Forget, it' s another collage film, but one that attacks European liberalism that "destroys everything" in Périot's words.

By David Fellerath
The Independent Weekly, 2005