Short Attention Span Cinema: Arthropoda
Friday, March 21 - Thursday, April 10, 2014
Now playing before our regular features: Arthropoda, a series of short, educational videos about bugs co-directed by Jessica Oreck and Michelle Enemark for the Children’s Documentary Network. Each episode is a colorful journey through the fascinating life-in-miniature of a particular creepy crawly – their lives, their histories and their surprisingly many virtues. Watch just a few and you may find that the animals we love to hate are actually, remarkably lovable.
The first three episodes of the ongoing, yet-to-be-released series will make you think twice about Hissing Cockroaches, Walking Sticks, and Chilean Rosehair Tarantulas.
Jessica Oreck makes projects large and small that hope to re-inspire a sense of wonder about the world of the every-day. She’s made a few features, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, and The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga (an official selection of this year’s New Directors/New Films) that all focus on ethnobiology. And she makes shorts too, like the recently released web series, “Mysteries of Vernacular.” She considers her second home the American Museum of Natural History where she sometimes works as a live animal keeper and docent.
Michelle Enemark is an animator and designer who focuses her work around the ideas of exploration and discovery. Michelle spent a year living and traveling in Eastern Europe where she wrote about and photographed forgotten natural history and medical collections as part of the travel site Curious Expeditions. Michelle also produces much of the design work for the hidden wonders website Atlas Obscura.
Children’s Documentary Network (launching in 2014) will be an online, interactive media platform comprised of global, non-fiction content for children and parents.