Updated 3/28/2023 Why do I make films? I'm not a solo artist. I cannot do this alone; there are always others, a team of collaborators. It starts with a new vision of the world and the adventure of discovery towards new ways of seeing and creating new contexts for what can be seen, felt, and experienced. Each film represents a personal dream coming true and a fulfillment of the dreams of those who join me. Filmmaking as dream machine, a deep river of images flooding forth from a dream vortex, where the personal meets the collective in the transpersonal. MY BACK STORY Over the last decade, DVDs have become all but phased out by online streaming services though I do believe in a DVD resurgence. DVD's are less compressed than streaming and have better picture and sound quality. Committed cinephiles have already started personal dvd libraries of their favorite films in a retro-trend that promises to expand in the coming years. My dvds are available through my book publsiher, The Original Falcon Press. In 2016, I started posting links to all my films as free views on YouTube and Vimeo. I reached a point of simply wanting to share the bounty of three decades of work with the world. Though I realize my films are not for everybody, it appears they are finding their own eccentric audience. HOW IT ALL BEGAN.
TRANSFORMING TRAGIC INTO MAGIC
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 with catastrophic consequences. 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 deceased true love beckons him from the great beyond. Highly creative women standing at the existential crossroads between Art or Motherhood inspired the making of THE GREATER CIRCULATION (2005) where the poet Rainer Maria Rilke transforms his grief over the sudden death of his friend, the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, into an epic prose lament, "Requiem for a Friend". Meanwhile, three women and their director prepare to stage an avant garde performance of Rilke's lament in present time, Berkeley California where the past meets the present
FEAR AND TREMBLING
PSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEYS xx After a five year hiatus from filmmaking, the Cinema Muses called me back with THE VANISHING FIELD (2020) - inspired by the ongoing impact of a spontaneous out of body experience I had in my early twenties. Filmed mostly in a Zen monastery with resident monks, The Vanishing Field was chiefly improvised on site. My "imaginal romance", THE ALCHEMY OF SULPHUR, (2021), mirrors my ongoing process of transforming trauma into art in a story about a writer attempting to escape heartbreak by writing herself into a story as a fictional character -- with unexpected real world repercussions. My Psi-Fi Noir feature, TRACER (2022), erupted from the ubiquitous surveillance culture around the world and how it acts on the collective psyche in a cat and mouse yarn unraveling through a maze of underworld
drug culture,
Russian remote viewing experiments, and a fractured family trying
to pick up the pieces.
PARATHEATRE. In 1977, I was deeply impacted by the late Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski's paratheatrical experiments in the forests of Poland and by his book, Towards a Poor Theater. From that point on, I began to develop my own "paratheatre" medium which I've documented in three books, "Towards an Archeology of the Soul" (2003), "State of Emergence" (2020) and "Sacred Rites" plus ten videos demonstrating various modalities of this dynamic group ritual process. Many themes, stories, and characters in my films were informed by Paratheatre experiences between 2010 and 2019 when we courted the archetype of the Muses. In late 2015, after nineteen prolific years of music and film production in Berkeley, Sylvi and I relocated to Portland Oregon and staged five original paratheatrical productions (documented on video) and recorded a series of original songs that we made into music videos as "bird&wolf".
THE VIDEOPOEMS xx |
Films Online, DVD Rentals & Sales, Filmography, I.M.Db
FILMS ONLINE (free)
YouTube and Vimeo
DVD Rentals
Movie Madness, Portland OR
DVD Sales
Original Falcon Press
Filmography
feature narratives & video experiments
- VENUE HISTORY -
tours and premieres
NORTHWEST FILM FORUM (Seattle), UC IRVINE (Irvine CA), PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE (Berkeley), MILLS COLLEGE CONCERT HALL (Oakland), FINE ARTS CINEMA (Berkeley), RED VIC MOVIEHOUSE (S.F.), PICKFORD CINEMA (Bellingham WA), DIVA CENTER (Eugene OR), CELLspace (S.F.), A.T.A. GALLERY (S.F.), PARKWAY SPEAKEASY THEATRE (Oakland), HOLLYWOOD THEATRE, (Portland), CLINTON ST. THEATER (Portland), GUILD (NW Film Center, Portland), 911 MEDIA ARTS (Seattle), CREST THEATRE (Sacramento), RED POPPY ART HOUSE (S.F.), BERKELEY ART CENTER (Berkeley), ROSE THEATRE (Port Townsend WA), ABUNDANT SUGAR (Los Angeles), 21 GRAND (Oakland), OAKLAND BLACK BOX (Oakland), DANZHAUS (S.F.), THE JAZZHOUSE (Berkeley), LIVE OAK THEATRE (Berkeley), LA PENA (Berkeley), ARTSHIP (Port of Oakland), MAGIC THEATRE (Nevada City), I-GONG (Seoul, S. Korea), FINNISH BROTHERHOOD HALL (Berkeley), MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (Santa Monica), VELVET ELVIS ARTS THEATRE (Seattle), COLOURBOX (Seattle), JUPITER CAFE and BLAKE'S (Berkeley), WEATHERED WALL (Seattle), GRACE NORTH CHURCH (Berkeley), ILLUSEUM (Amsterdam, Netherlands), THE HUMANIST HALL (Oakland), ANNO DOMINI GALLERY (San Jose), SUBTERRANEAN ARTHOUSE (Berkeley), THE LOST CHURCH (San Francisco), CLOUD 9 (Berkeley), BERKELEY ARTS FESTIVAL (Berkeley), THE DREAM INSTITUTE (Berkeley), EAST BAY MEDIA CENTER (Berkeley), UNIVERSITY BOOK STORE (Berkeley), SANTA CRUZ INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART (Santa Cruz), PERFORMANCE WORKS NORTHWEST (Portland OR), HEADWATERS THEATRE (Portland OR), PERFORMANCEWORKS NW (Portland), BOLINAS COMMUNITY CENTER (Bolinas)
bio, contact points, site map
In 1977, Antero was deeply impacted by the Paratheatre of Jerzy Grotowski
inspiring him to develop his own ritual technology of Paratheatre documented in
three books: “Towards an Archeology of the Soul” (2003), ”State of Emergence:
Experiments in Group Ritual Dynamics” (2020) and “Sacred Rites: Journal Entires of
a Gnostic Heretic” (2023). His paratheatrical work is documented in academia by
Nicoletta Isar, Professor at the Institute of Art History, Copenhagen University.
Between 1977 and 2018, Antero wrote, directed, and performed in numerous
experimental theatre productions. As a prolific underground filmmaker he has,
since 1993, created fifteen critically acclaimed feature art films. Alli is also the
author of numerous esoteric books including Angel Tech, The Eight-Circuit
Brain, The Akashic Record Player, Experiential Astrology, and others.