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The Experimental Cinema Group at CU Boulder was ushered in by Carla Selby and Gladney Oakley and was later carried forward by Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage. It is now called First Person Cinema and the curator is Don Yannacito. This program was started in 1955 with the intention of bringing an awareness of the personal cinema to Boulder, and has become a highly respected international showcase for the makers of personal film. It is the longest running program in the world screening avant-garde film and video work.

Most screenings are Mondays at 7:00pm in the Visual Arts Complex Auditorium 1B20 / Admission is free.

Student Award Showcase

Student Award Showcase

Monday, February 8, 2021
7:00pm on Zoom; Meeting ID 931 3292 8055

Winners of The Grillo Awards

Made possible with funds from the Arts and Cultural Enrichment Fee. Free admission. The Grillo awards are designed to encourage excellence in filmmaking and help defray some of the expenses required to pursue a degree in film production. A total of up to $17,000 of Grillo funds is distributed each year to four tiers of production students. Final recipients and individual award amounts will be determined each semester by in-class student votes and a panel of judges made up of CU Film Studies faculty and outside professionals. A selection of award-winning films will be shown one night only. The Grillo Awards are drawn from a University of Colorado Foundation fund set up in the early 1990s by Virgil Grillo (1938-1994), the founder and former Director of the CU Film Studies Program, whose dedication and vision helped shepherd Film Studies from its modest beginnings in the 1970s to an undergraduate program with some 600 students.

Alex Rivera

Alex Rivera

Monday, March 15, 2021
7:00 PM

Alex Rivera is a filmmaker who has been telling new, urgent, and visually adventurous Latino stories for more than twenty years. His first feature film, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. Rivera’s second feature film, a documentary/scripted hybrid, The Infiltrators, won both the Audience Award and the Innovators Award in the NEXT section of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary Feature at the Blackstar Film Festival, and is currently being developed as a scripted series by Blumhouse Television. Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Creative Capital, and many others. Alex studied at Hampshire College, was the Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and is currently a distinguished lecturer of media studies at Queens College.

Grad Student Showcase

Grad Student Showcase

Monday, April 26, 2021
7:00pm (open air and/or virtual)

McKenzie Blake is a filmmaker whose work revolves around personal memory, narratives and found footage. She works with digital and analog formats as well as experimenting with the process of animation.

Emily Van Loan is an experimental filmmaker and artist. They create diaristic, autobiographical works with the intention of fostering connections between audience and maker or perhaps within an audience.

Eileen Roscina is an experimental filmmaker, artist and naturalist based out of Denver, Colorado. Through the study of biophilia, her work examines human’s spiritual and social (dis)connection with nature, and seeks to raise questions about realizing a radically different metaphoric mapping of time, space and our place in the world.

Madeline Plumley is a filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky. She believes that art is labor and the working class is the only creative class. She works at making films that are a part of the celebration of life and labor.