Saturday Fantasy guest speakers Joshua Dysart and Joshua Hale Fialkov will be signing books and hanging out at STORIES Bookstore after their panel discussion at our film festival. STORIES is located a few doors down from Rec Center Studio at 1716 W. Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026. A limited number of copies of their books will be available for purchase.

Big thanks to Liz, Claudia and the folks at STORIES for hosting this book signing! Coupons for STORIES Bookstore Cafe will be available at Saturday Fantasy Film Festival with general admission ticket.

// Buy your Saturday Fantasy Film Festival tickets via PayPal for just $10.

UPDATE: Saturday Fantasy Film Festival Raffle is now a Giveaway!
What does that mean? Well, now all you have to do is show up on Saturday, October 24, 2009, 12 PM and register to win. Join us for a day of sci-fi, fantasy, horror films and discussions exploring hope and fear in uncertain times. Winners of the Giveaway will be drawn and announced the day of the event, and prizes will be distributed immediately. Entry forms will only be available at the event.

We have some amazing items that we will be giving away including a one-night stay at The Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles and a gift certificate from Meltdown Comics.
To learn more about the Giveaway Prizes check out the link below.

See you Saturday, October 24, 2009 and Good luck!

**

One Night Stay and Breakfast Gift Certificate
at The Standard Hotel, Downtown
Retail Value: $575
The Standard Hotel is located at 550 South Flower at Sixth Street Los Angeles CA 90071. Hotel amenities include 24-hour restaurant, pool-side bar and cafe, heated roof-top pool, complimentary wireless internet and 24-hour room service.

**

Meltdown Comics $50 Gift Certificate
Meltdown is the largest comic book store on the west coast and was named Best Comic Store in L.A. by Los Angeles magazine, the LA WEEKLY, and honored with the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award last Century. Meltdown Comics is located at 7522 Sunset Blvd, L.A., CA 90046

**

Penelope Movie Collectibles Pack
Comedy/fantasy film starring: Christina Ricci, James McAvoy, Catherine O’Hara, Reese Witherspoon, Peter Dinklage, Richard E. Grant, Simon Woods, Ronni Ancona, Nick Frost, Richard James. The Penelope Movie Collectibles Pack includes: rare collectible French poster, Director’s Cut UK DVD and Penelope Soundtrack, and last but not least a Penelope Messenger Shirt Costume worn by Reese Witherspoon in Penelope.

**

We are excited to announce this year’s Saturday Fantasy Film Festival Official Selections. After screening nearly 100 film submissions from around the world, we have selected 11 short sci-fi, fantasy or horror films exploring hope and fear in uncertain times. This year’s selections come from the USA, Canada, Spain, Australia and the UK, and they each explore future societies, cloning, disease, urban legends, myths, other worlds and more.

(more…)

Saturday Fantasy Reader is an ongoing series that looks at a selection of works in Sci-fi, Fantasy or Horror that explore hope or fear in uncertain times. Each episode sheds light on a selection of titles, curated under a loose theme. These are not so much required reading, as much as they are recommended check-it-outs.

We saw it fitting to start our series with John Donne’s infamous quote from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Written while he recovered from a serious illness, the quote which comes from Meditation XVII, pinpoints a crucial idea driving Saturday Fantasy: we are all in this together. The following works examine various scenarios in which individuals cope with the unknown worlds around them.

We’ll start off with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932 and set in London 2540 A.D. (or 632 A.F., After Ford). The novel eerily anticipates many developments currently existing today, like reproductive technology, answers in a pill, and sleep-learning. His vision of a future society although polished and shiny possessed dark undertones fueled by fear.

Island is Huxley’s utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 novel Brave New World, and it was also his last novel. In this novel, Huxley explored ideas of society from a more hopeful lens.

LOST is a massive, complex narrative. But back in Season 1, before we really had a chance to realize all of that, 48 survivors of plane crash found themselves stranded on a mysterious island, in uncertain circumstances, coping to find ways to survive: their pasts, the present, and eventually their futures. The narratives strove for depth, and were told in a very compelling format. Television never seemed the same afterwards.

Speaking of finding yourself on a “mysterious” island: H.R. Pufnstuf, the 1970s kids show produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, told a fairy tale of good versus evil, and centered on a shipwrecked boy named Jimmy, who rides on a mysterious boat to kooky Living Island, home of dancing trees and singing frogs. The premise was out-there, featuring highly imaginative characters and plot lines, leaving it open for criticism as a drug-induced fantasy.

To close out our set, we have the very tantalizing and stimulating 1973 French animation Fantastic Planet (or La Planète Sauvage). Set on a far away planet with a highly evolved race of beings called Draags who have advanced technology and spiritual developments, and keep human being savages called Oms as domesticated pets. The film explores social relations and hierarchies through beautifully surreal imagery created by the French writer and artist Roland Topor. At this time, a remake of the film is in development to be released in 2010.

The Complete Passage from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Next Episode: The Kids Are Alright

Saturday Fantasy Q+A is our ongoing post series that probes the thoughts and insights of individuals participating in sci-fi, fantasy and horror genres.

**
Donna Golden is a digital media artist and filmmaker. She creates processed, collaged, remixed, animated videos exploring our relationships to history, memory, language, and power. Before coming to Los Angeles to study experimental animation, she worked as an editor in New York and participated in art/activist collectives creating multimedia projects exhibited at festivals and museums in the US and abroad. Her videos have been shown at the Black Maria Film & Video Festival, the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight series, and the Atlanta Underground Film Festival. She holds a BA in US History from Columbia University and is a (soon-to-be!) MFA grad in Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts.

  Watching cartoons & sci-fi movies (Kimba the White Lion, UltraMan, anyone?), making my own breakfast (Steak-um sandwiches, seriously), or staying in bed reading sci-fi novels (lots and lots of Andre Norton) donated by an aunt.

  The look of the project (animated photo collage) is loosely inspired by political graphics posters from the 60s and 70s (esp. OSPAAAL posters). Although the posters weren’t intended to be satirical, they nonetheless provided a starting point for visualizing the film.

Re: fantasy, there’s a line I love from a well-known Donna Haraway essay where she talks about those “… who can join rational conversation and fantastic imaginings that change history.” This concept of connecting seemingly incompatible and contradictory elements - the fantastic, the rational, the serious, the absurd - is really exciting to me.

  I’m interested in our relationship to history: how our understanding of the past affects our capacity to act in the present, and how we generate new tools (i.e., language, images, ideas) or rely on existing ones, to imagine and shape the future.

Film/video making gives me the chance to play with a lot of elements: sound design, mood, color, motion, rhythm, animation techniques and/or live action, and to explore an idea or work through a problem over time.

  We seem to have an apocalypse fetish - obsessing/fantasizing about “end times”: economic disintegration, environmental collapse, global pandemics, 2012, FEMA camps. We may be at the end of one era (neoliberalism, unipolar world, etc..), but it’s not at all clear what’s going to come next. That uncertainty, coupled with a sense of vulnerability, generates, for me at least, alternate bouts of panic and exhilaration.

I think we’re living in an age of extreme possibility - which direction that leads is up to us.

  I’m working on a follow-up to A Comforting Thought. I’m planning a series of animated commentaries: “Notes on the Habits of Highly Successful Societies”, so I’m looking forward to sharing those.

Join us Saturday, October 24, 2009 at Rec Center Studio to view Donna’s short animation, A Comforting Thought.
// www.saturdayfantasy.com

Saturday Fantasy guest speaker Joshua Dysart was recently featured in a New York Times article for his work on Unknown Soldier, the comic book series published by Vertigo. The article is insightful to Joshua’s process— which included a trip to Africa to immerse himself in the topic— and the story that emerges from it.

To learn more about Joshua, please visit his website: www.joshuadysart.com

Saturday Fantasy Q+A is our ongoing post series that probes the thoughts and insights of individuals participating in sci-fi, fantasy and horror genres.

**
David Brin is a scientist, speaker, technical consultant and world-known author. His novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. His non-fiction book — The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? — deals with secrecy in the modern world, and has won the Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association. His science fictional Uplift Universe explores a future when humans genetically engineer higher animals like dolphins to become equal members of our civilization.

As a speaker and on television, David shares unique insights — serious and humorous — about ways that changing technology may affect our future lives. He lives in San Diego County with his wife, three children, and a hundred very demanding trees.

  As a kid? Well, I read a lot. Tussled with my brothers. Built models. Played outside with neighborhood kids. Once a month or two there was a boy scout trip to get me out of town.

  A haunted house. Destroy New York City! Explore the next phases of feminism.

  A willingness to contemplate the clear fact that human beings, and their societies and relationships, change. I do not write science fiction because of the science. I write it because change is the relentless, driving fact of our existence. It throws all of our certainties and assumptions into flux. Genres and authors who frantically avoid dealing with this fundamental issue are — all-too often — simply myopic cowards.

  For me, it is an age to be contrary. There are hope-fetishists who think we’ll soon solve all problems and become near-gods. When I am around them, my ornery-contrary nature starts spinning out failure modes and pitfalls that might trip up those fond dreams.

More often, I find myself around tedious, dullard, unimaginative cynics, who think that they invented dyspeptic grumbling. These fools do far more harm than the optimists do. Worse, they are boring. Around them, I find (ironically) that I can see ten thousand ways for us to succeed.

  Alas, life has become frenetic, with speeches and consulting work, my new inventions, and three active kids (the biggest project of all!). If I could duplicate myself a dozen times over, there’d still be too little time.

In 2010 keep eyes open for EXISTENCE, my next big novel about the very topic of how humanity might succeed… or fail.

To learn more about David Brin and his work, please visit:
// www.davidbrin.com

This year’s film festival to explore the powers of fantasy, imagination, hope and fear

(Los Angeles) - Trade&Row announces We, the People 2009: Saturday Fantasy Film Festival, an all-day three-part festival held Saturday, October 24, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA, at a location to be announced. A call for entries of film submissions are being accepted now through September 4, 2009 at www.saturdayfantasy.com.

In the midst of a recession, many people are looking to the Obama administration to walk the talk of the audacity of hope. With the message from analysts that things will get worse before they get better after many have already lost jobs and homes, some are exploring outside of the research and talking heads the extreme possibilities of what could and should happen.

In the worst of times, both hope and fear drive our imagination. For this year’s film festival, Trade&Row will select films that explore hope and fear in the form of live action shorts, animation, suspense and, of course, fantasy. From apocalyptic to euphoric, films may examine neophobia, decidophobia, epistemophobia, dreams, faith and desire to draw a fine line between where we are and where we could be economically, culturally and socially.

In conjunction with the film screenings, Trade&Row will partner with other organizations to conduct workshops/seminars for viewers of all ages. More details and scheduling coming soon.

For more info please visit: www.saturdayfantasy.com

DEADLINE & SUBMISSION DETAILS

Deadline for ALL submissions is September 4, 2009. All films should be 30 minutes or less in length, standard DVD format.

For more information about the festival, please visit: www.saturdayfantasy.com

ABOUT TRADE&ROW

Trade&Row is a Los Angeles-based 501c3 nonprofit organization established to raise awareness of current issues. We develop community outreach programs that are designed to be accessible, inclusive and conversational while also being enjoyable.

For more information about Trade&Row, please visit: www.tradeandrow.org