Jim Finn

The Drunkard's Lament

Jim Finn

Isabella Pinheiro, Linda Montano

A strange, epistolary and revisionist musical adaptation of Wuthering Heights written by the consumptive brother Branwell Brontë. When Branwell - the ne'er-do-well, tubercular brother of the Brontë sisters - discovered that Emily was writing her first novel, he offered to be her editor. Once he realized that he was the model for the alcoholic Hindley Earnshaw character, he reimagined the story as a musical memoir of his own life with Hindley as the hero. Reconstructed from Branwell's letters to his friend Francis Leyland along with notes, sheet music and damaged film fragments - this 1898 film originally premiered on the 50th anniversary of the consumption deaths of Branwell and Emily Brontë.

The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant

Jim Finn

Cosmina Mazza Finn, Franz Mazza Finn

Numerous films deal with the American Civil War, which raged between the northern Union States and the southern Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. One general who rose to become a war icon and the 18th pres-ident of the United States was Ulysses S. Grant. Director Jim Finn uses board games to reconstruct the battles and documents a divided nation full of rebellious factions.

Sunday School with Franz Hinkelammert

Jim Finn

The violent overreaction to 9/11 and the revolutions of the 1960's cannot be explained only with fear and politics. Franz Hinkelammert, a German-born liberation theologian, economist and philosopher, brings religion front and center to the discussion in a unique way. The emptiness and senselessness felt by those at the margins of a free-market Utopian ideology has been filled by an extreme millenarian Christianity and other fundamentalist religions that justify murder and torture as preemptive self-defense. In place of a suicidal theology of death based on defeating or marginalizing others, Hinkelammert advocates an economics that promotes coexistence by looking towards liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor.

The Juche Idea

Jim Finn

Jung Yoon Lee, Daniela Kostova

Jim Finn, follows a South Korean video artist in North Korea who hopes to revitalize Juche cinema, somewhat inspired by a true story of a South Korean filmmaker kidnapped in the 70s to make the North Korean film industry better. This experimental satire that examines what happens when a South Korean filmmaker sojourns into communist North Korea to breathe new life into that country's flagging, propaganda-driven movie industry. Believing that cinema can prop up North Korea's Juche Idea of self-reliance, mad dictator Kim Jong-Il pulls out all the stops to help the young émigré produce appropriate films.

La trinchera luminosa del presidente Gonzalo

Jim Finn

Magali Arreola, Yazmín Chávez

A recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement in their morning marches to their bedtime chants. Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that were imprisoned. Their cellblocks were another front in the People's War-- "shining trenches of combat". This film shows the intense indoctrination and belief system of the brutal Latin American insurgency.

Wüstenspringmaus

Jim Finn

A mockumentary about gerbils.

Interkosmos

Jim Finn

Interkosmos is a musical documentary-style film about the East German space program-a program with the energy and creativity of the Soviet arts scene of the 1920s and a bit of the hippie sensibility from West Germany of the early 1970s. The story is about a failed space colonization mission called "wundertüte" and is told through narration, dialogue, letters, and period songs.

Great Man and Cinema

Jim Finn

Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, ran the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father's cult of personality. The film's title GREAT MAN AND CINEMA comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how the Dear Leader has written, edited, produced and given acting advice in films for the last forty years. This film succinctly synthesizes the Dear Leader's directing philosophy with his feelings toward the imperialist beast at his heels. GREAT MAN AND CINEMA is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker Jim Finn).

Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell

Jim Finn

"River ice sets the scene for Judy Garland's international cri de coeur. It's hard to understate the amount of anxiety created by a Vice President who usurped authority for eight years to start wars and wreck the economy and then sidled off to Wyoming to be a retired 'hero of the right.' Impunity is not just the stuff of autocratic dictatorships in the third world. The American form of impunity is going to get us all killed."

Blind Spot

Oleg Mavromatti

Jim Finn, Adam Zaretsky

A film about the ability to see the world in a different way, a way most people do not see it, while their eyesight is being filtered in the name of the phantom "comfort and calmness."

super-max

Jim Finn

Prisons step into the limelight in Jim Finn's portrait of these monstrosities photographed while passing in a vehicle.

Chums from Across the Void

Jim Finn

Little Radek, the step-dancing Bolshevik; Machera, the Andean Robin Hood, and Maria Spiridonova, the pre-Soviet socialist assassin are your guides for Past Leftist Life Regression therapy. Former Trotskyite turned suburban housewife, narrator Lois Severin creates a way to cope with life in the Prime Material Plane of Corporate Capitalism and to create a 21st-Century revolution of the mind.

Decision 80

Jim Finn

Appropriated network-TV footage of Jimmy Carter’s "I see risk" speech from the 1980 Democratic Convention meets Reagan’s gloomy inaugural ride through D.C.: "If you succumb to a dream world, you’ll wake up to a nightmare."