Why do I make films? More honest question: why do we make films? I cannot do this alone; there are always others, a team. It starts with a desire to find new ways of seeing. But this can only happen after I become receptive enough to the Muses call; not "my" Muses (they belong to no one!). Until then, I want intimacy with the fertile void, the source of all creation, and its hilarious offspring, the singing womb of the Poetic Imagination.

My films don't fit into any existing cinematic genre; they are marketting nightmares! Most of my feature movies are veiled autobiographies, docufictions, giving narrative and poetic form to my internal landscape interacting with and being acted on by real world events. This process started with the sudden tragic death of my young daughter Zoe in September of 1992. The worst thing that could ever happen to me, happened to me. Great losses sometimes come with gifts and, this unfathomable loss gifted me with a gift that keeps on giving.  The eyes of my eyes opened. I saw "death" as an illusion, an intellectual symbol for fear, social control, and oppression. I saw through the lies of society and saw the eternal cycles of Life. People come and go but Life continues. I've seen true Love upstage Death in the Theatre of Life.

x "The Oracle " (1993) and "The Drivetime" (1995) 

Waves of grief and epiphany guided the scripting and production of my first feature, THE ORACLE (1993), about a cynical elder patriarch whose granddaughter, Ariadne, appears in his dreams as a guide on his final night on earth. My own cynicism withered after being inspired by my friend Rob Brezsny's ideas of "the drivetime", an interface between dreamtime and daytime realities. Together, we wrote and produced THE DRIVETIME (1995), about a federal time-travelling librarian from the year 2023 returning to 1999 via the dreams of a Seattle video activist shooting police riots. Five years later, I was moved to explore conflicting religious beliefs in TRAGOS (2000), a  cyber-noir witch hunt tale about a fundamentalist Christian attourney mistakenly convinced that a blind pagan woman is the leader of a 'satanic suicide cult'. 

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"Tragos" (2000) and "Under a Shipwrecked Moon" (2003) 

The racial profiling immediately following the 9/11 attacks outraged the making of HYSTERIA (2002; written with Jakob Bokulich), about a Croatian Catholic soldier who drinks datura tea and mistakes a powerful hallucination for a visitation from the Holy Virgin Mary. On my fiftieth birthday, I felt compelled to explore my Finnish roots in UNDER A SHIPWRECKED MOON (2003), where a Finnish-American family visits their hospitalized, comatose patriarch whose true love beckons him from the great beyond. Highly creative women standing at the crossroads between sacrificing their lives to Art or Motherhood inspired the making of THE GREATER CIRCULATION (2005) -- set in present-time Berkeley and in Paris, 1908 -- where poet Rainer Maria Rilke transforms his grief over the sudden death of his friend, the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, into his epic prose lament, "Requiem for a Friend". 

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"The Greater Circulation" (2005) and "The Invisible Forest" (2008) 

Fear-mongering politics triggered the creation of my dark comedy, THE MIND IS A LIAR AND A WHORE (2007), about a quirky Berkeley household climbing the slippery slopes between actual and perceived threats during an alleged bioterrorist attack in their city. I returned to my earliest theatrical influence, Antonin Artaud, for THE INVISIBLE FOREST (2008) about an insomniac theatre director (whom I portray) conducting a group paratheatrical experiment in a forest when a series of disturbing dreams forces him to question his sanity. The suspicious circumstances surrounding the deathbed signing of documents between my late friend and mentor, Christopher S. Hyatt and his son, compelled the making of  TO DREAM OF FALLING UPWARDS (2011), a zany occult saga about an urban sex magickian who seeks the help pf a Castaneda-style desert witch to solve a vexing esoteric problem of spirit posession. 

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"To Dream of Falling Upwards" (2011) and "Flamingos" (2012)

My need to work through unresolved liasons with certain women led to FLAMINGOS (2012), an outlaw romance noir about twin sisters in love with a bank-robbing hypnotist junkie. My feminist fable THE BOOK OF JANE (2013) developed from a vision of three generations of women and the overlapping worlds of the nomadic homeless, ivory tower academia, and pre-Hellenic goddess worship. My ongoing relationship with the imaginal realm of the Muses inspired OUT OF THE WOODS (2015) a magical realist drama of a young man who survives a near-death experience with amnesia and a disturbing new psychic talent that forces a new identity. After a five year hiatus from filmmaking, the Cinema Muses called me back with THE VANISHING FIELD (2020), a personal story inspired by the ongoing impact of a spontaneous out of body experience I had in my early twenties -- reframed within the setting of a Zen monastery with three monks (non-actors) improvising dialogue based on my on-site suggestions; Zen filmmaking...

 
"The Vanishing Field" (2020)

In 1977, Jerzy Grotowski's paratheatrical group experiments inspired me to create my own "paratheatre" medium -- combining methods of physical theatre, dance, and Zazen standing meditation to access autonomous forces in The Body as movement resources. Between 1995 and 2019, I underwent a series of paratheatrical group experiments that conjured the seed visions for many of my films during this period. Between 1991 and 2018, nine video documents were also produced showing various modalities of this paratheatrical process. In late 2015, after nineteen prolific years of music and film production in Berkeley, Sylvi and I relocated to Portland Oregon where we developed and staged five new performance works while recording and performing our original music as bird&wolf some of which I made into music videos.

"Escape from Chapel Perilous" (2018) Paratheatre Video document
"Deep Blue" (2020; bird&wolf music video)

Since 1992, I crafted numerous "videopoems" using text by Blake, Rilke, Neruda, H.D., Rimbaud, Plath, & others as well as many short experimentals.  With the exception of these shorter works, most of my films and videos have been highly collaborative with  many others. I remain especially grateful for the support and artistic inspiration of my wife, the multi-talented Sylvi Alli and my skillful features editor, Chris Odell (2000-2015).  So far, all my movies have been self-funded and/or co-produced with peers. Each movie typically takes four to twelve months from concept to final cut. My work gains promotional support from reviews at filmthreat.com and various film review blogs. Recently, I made all my movies and short works available for free viewing online at this webpage.

truly,
ANTERO ALLI

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"The Book of Jane" (2013) and "Out of the Woods" (2015)