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[whitespace] Dancing in The Streets

By Sullivan Bianco

The "15th Annual Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema," as it's officially named, is but one of the projects of the 23-year-old organization known as FAF (Film Arts Foundation). Besides the fest, FAF works throughout the year as a well-oiled machine, centralizing and uniting the resources for creating truly independent feature films. Other than the exhibition of new complete work, FAF holds retrospectives and publicly screens works in progress.

One of the Film Arts Foundation's more interesting projects is dedicated to "guerrilla musicals" such as Rebecca Salzer and Chris Brown's Office Furniture. The film follows one woman's wade into job-hungry clichés ("I'm a team player, I'm a hard worker, I'm a self-starter") and shows a not-quite-in-sync troupe of leaping, business-suited rovers. What makes it innately pleasing is how it manages to emulate old MGM cityscape dancing (cf. The Bandwagon or It's Always Fair Weather) without succumbing to slickness, valuing the variegated bodies and clothes over stiff Riverdance-y uniformity.

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From the October 25, 1999 issue of the Metropolitan.

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