After enjoying photographs, a large-scale painting, drinks, conversation, and Blackfeather’s brilliant collection of vintage clothing, step outside for short films from two of Austin’s brightest filmmakers. Denise Prince’s The Lollipop Girls Struggle on the Hard Earth and Peter Mattei’s Terrible Things.

Prince’s film is full of longing for a return to the safety, the ease, the pretends of childhood, The Lollipop Girls Struggle on the Hard Earth reminds us that Fantasy organizes our experience of everyday reality and tells us who we are.

Employing the visual language of ready-to-wear (fashion) film, a woman finds herself, by choice, in a perfected world, reminiscent of classic childhood literature. Satisfactions abound. But the rules of Desire apply.

Equating personal longing and its rich satisfaction with effective advertising, The Lollipop Girls Struggle on the Hard Earth is about the memory of the missing thing (Desire). Whether the singsong of a storybook or commercial seduction, what Fantasy holds behind the veil is subject in abstentum.

Peter Mattei’s Terrible Things is also about the fantasies we have of who we are, although Mattei uses a cinema verite style quite different than the commercial language in Prince’s work. Terrible Things follows Bob Foushee, a New Englander who sees himself as Dracula.

This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department