Margin Release

STRANGE CULTURE:
A film by Lynn Hershman Leeson starring Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan and Peter Coyote. 2007, 75 minutes.
7PM IN CRAIG LECTURE HALL
SCREENING WITH STEVE KURTZ

Everything changed for conceptual artist Steve Kurtz on the morning of May 11, 2004, when he awoke to discover that his 45-year-old wife, Hope, had died in her sleep. A domestic tragedy turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare after the paramedics he summoned, alarmed by the Petri dishes, scientific equipment and books in his house, reported him to the FBI as a suspected bio-terrorist. The founders of the Critical Art Ensemble, Kurtz and his wife had been working on an installation about the emergence of biotechnology for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The live cultures they were using were as harmless as yogurt, but a Hazmat team from Quantico descended on their home, arrested Kurtz, carried away his equipment, computers and papers, and seized his wife’s body from the coroner. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s unconventional documentary, which features Kurtz himself and actors Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote, Thomas Jay Ryan (Fay Grim, also screening at this year’s Festival) and Josh Kornbluth, combines reenactments and interviews to tell a tale of government overreaction that would be comic if it weren’t appalling and still unresolved nearly three years later. Though cleared of bio-terrorism, Kurtz still faces federal indictments that could result in a long prison term. Strange Culture is a story not only of post-9/11 paranoia but also of the clash between the “strange culture” of art and dissent and a Justice Department unwilling to admit it has made a mistake.

—Pamela Troy
San Francisco International Film Festival