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 follow the Muses; 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 moviesare like 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 vision; 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 glimpsed the eternal cycles of Life. People come and go but Life itself 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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"Hysteria" (2002) 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 look back and 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 I have personally known 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, 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 my anxious X-mas 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 hios son, compelled the making of  TO DREAM OF FALLING UPWARDS (2011), a zany occult thriller about an urban sex magickian who seeks the help pf a Castaneda-style desert witch to solve the vexing esoteric problem of spirit posession. 

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

A need to work through my unresolved relationships and liasons with 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, 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.

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

Between movies, I have immersed myself in a series of paratheatrical group experiments that inspired seed visions for many of my films. I started developing this paratheatre in 1977 after being blown away by Jerzy Grotowski's "Akropolis" and his early paratheatrical group work (as told by Andre Gregory in Louis Malle's great film, "My Dinner with Andre"). In 2003, my paratheatrical workbook "Towards an Archeology of the Soul" was published. Between 1991 and 2018, I produced nine video documents showing performance and non-performance modalities of this work: ARCHAIC COMMUNITY (1991), CRUX (1999), ORPHANS OF DELIRIUM (2004),  DREAMBODY/EARTHBODY (2012), A TURBULENCE OF MUSES (2016), BARDOVILLE (2017), SOROR MYSTICA (2017), FALLEN MONSTERS (2018) and ESCAPE FROM CHAPEL PERILOUS (2018).

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"Escape from Chapel Perilous" (2018) Paratheatre Video document

Between 1991 and 2001, I crafted about a dozen short works including LILY IN LIMBO (1996; 27 min.; with Sylvi Alli), ROADKILL, (2001; 27 min) ) and the more abstract "videopoems" using text by Rilke, Neruda, H.D., Rimbaud, Plath, Tzara, & others.  With the exception of these short works, most of what I have done has been collaborative and would never have happened without the talent, skill and energy of many others. I am especially grateful for the personal and artistic support of my wife, the multi-talented Sylvi Alli (since 1990) and my skillful features editor, Chris Odell (2000-2015). 

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VideoPoems: "Fears" (2001) and "Lily in Limbo" (1996)

So far, all my movies have been self-funded and/or co-produced with peers. I never saw the point in applying and waiting for corporate grants or studio funding when I can start working right away and maintain total creative control. Not including the time it takes to raise funds, each movie typically takes six to twelve months from concept to final cut. My public screenings gain promotional support from the film review critics at filmthreat.com and at various film review blogs. My movies and short works are available for viewing online (free of charge) at this webpage and can be booked for public screenings by event producers here.

After 24 years of almost constant film and video production I took a four year hiatus, relocated to Portland Oregon in late 2015 where Sylvi and I developed five new performance works of ritual-based intermedia theatre (documented on video). During this period, we also recorded our original music as bird&wolf made them into a series of music videos. Two or three times a year, my movies screen in Portland at the Clinton Street Theater and PerformanceWorks NW. I am currently in post-production for "The Vanishing Field" about a Zen monk wrestling with the aftermath of a spontaneous out-of-body experience; Spring 2020 premiere, Portland OR.

truly,
ANTERO ALLI
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