Underground in the Bottoms

Luci Harper, the one-woman committee in charge of this weekend’s Lucid Underground Media Arts Festival, isn’t showing limited-distribution films on an off night at a regular movie theater. She’s showing zero-distribution films in a former speakeasy in the West Bottoms.

When Harper was a student at the University of Iowa, she enjoyed working on a film festival there. “I kept it in the back of my head as something that I wanted to do again,” she says. “When I moved here, I decided to do one myself.”

She sent newspapers and film schools a call for entries, then set up a Web site where people interested in avant-garde cinema could find out what she was doing. Harper received more than thirty submissions, fourteen of which she chose to play at this Saturday’s festival.

“I kind of tossed around a few ideas, but I knew that I wanted to have a kind of gritty location,” Harper says of her decision to screen the films in the Fahrenheit Gallery building. Now that the nearby haunted houses have closed for the season, the space should be free of blood-curdling screams.

That should make for a peaceful environment to watch Christina Panushka’s three-minute Singing Sticks (in which carved rubber stamps become dancing people) and Angela Huffman’s four-and-a-half-minute Out of the Water, which the filmmaker describes as “an animated documentary focusing on the misconceptions humans have about sharks.”

“It’s not your typical PBS documentary,” Harper says about Huffman’s project. “There’s this guy sitting at a table, and he’s eating chicken wings. It’s in fast motion, and it’s kind of gross. She uses some footage from nature documentaries and some footage that she went out and got at the zoo.”

Don’t expect Harper to explain what the guy eating chicken wings has to do with sharks. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just, like, what the … ?”