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!). 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 movies are veiled autobiographies, oneric 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 second 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
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'. 

xx
"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". 

 x
"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. My next film explored the suspicious circumstances surrounding the deathbed signing of documents between a former mentor, Christopher S. Hyatt and his son in  TO DREAM OF FALLING UPWARDS (2011), a zany occult saga about an urban sex magickian who seeks help from a Castaneda-style desert witch to solve a vexing esoteric problem of spirit posession. 

xx
"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 SYLVANI (formerly "Out of the Woods" 2015 and recut in 2021) an imaginal love story of a young man who survives a near-death experience with amnesia and a disturbing new psychic talent that forces a new identity.

xx 
"The Book of Jane" (2013) and "The Vanishing Field" (2020)

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. My next feature, "THE ALCHEMY OF SULPHUR" (2021) is a magical realist romance with the power of imagination as a writer manufactures crises in her main relationship to spur her creative process. Production planned for May/June 2021.

"Bardoville" (2017) Paratheatre Video document

In 1977, I was inspired by Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski's early paratheatrical experiments to develop my own "aratheatre" medium combining methods of physical theatre, dance, and Zazen standing meditation to deep access to the internal landscape. Between 1991 and 2020, numerous video documents were produced showing various modalities of this 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 paratheatrical productions (documented on video). During this time, we also recorded a series of our own songs as bird&wolf which were made into music videos.

xx
"Living with a Sorceress" (2020; videopoem)
"Deep Blue" (2020; bird&wolf music video)

Since 1992, I have been crafting numerous short "videopoems" using text by Blake, Rilke, Neruda, H.D., Rimbaud, Plath, & others, as well as, many experimental works.  With the exception of these short works, most of my films and videos have been made in collaboration with many others. I am especially grateful for the support and artistic inspiration of my wife, the multi-talented Sylvi Alli and my skillful editor, Chris Odell (features from 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 other film review blogs. All my feature movies and short works are now available for free viewing online at this webpage.

truly,
ANTERO ALLI

xx