Micro Cinema Club -- required viewing

Indie Memphis's excellent and free monthly Micro Cinema Club series has its next screening Wednesday, Sept. 14 at 7:30 p.m. Clear your calendar and book it. September’s lineup includes:

• "Free Radicals" (pictured): Dreaming of hot sand, females, and mahi-mahi, three Rocky Mountain cockroaches enter the extreme ski contest of a lifetime. Image courtesy University of Southern California.
• "Joey," an intimate and vivid portrayal of the lives of children growing up amid gangs and violence in South Los Angeles, by Nancy Montuori.
• "Packrat," the filmmaker’s examination of her family's struggle to deal with "packratting,” which may be a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder, by Kris Britt Montag.
• Venom Sportswear Ad Campaign, a series of mockumentary ads by 24-year-old Christopher "C-dub" Wang (director Jimmy Tsai) at the hoops rapping about Yao Ming, genetics and becoming the first Chinese basketball player in the NBA.
• "Distance from the Sun," a glimpse of the internal struggle of today's American Muslim through the eyes of Naim, a Middle-Eastern immigrant chef in small town America, by Eyad Zahra.
• Indie Memphis Television Commercials, a five-minute program chronicling the eight-year history of the Indie Memphis Film Festival through TV spots produced by various indie filmmakers.

Indie Memphis, God love 'em, is the organizer of the annual Soul of Southern Film Festival. The Micro Cinema Club is the second Wednesday of every month at 7:30 p.m. in the Power House gallery, 45. G. E. Patterson. Admission is free and screenings generally last 90 minutes with free popcorn and beverages provided. The official boilerplate: Indie Memphis, founded in 1998 to provide a voice and forum for the diverse Memphis film community, is an initiative of Delta Axis, a non-profit 501(c)3 arts organization. Recognizing the contributions of the Delta to music and literature, the Delta Axis mission is to highlight similar contributions in contemporary visual arts. Indie Memphis promotes the contributions of Southerners and independent artists to what is arguably today’s most important art form: filmmaking. The Indie Memphis Soul of Southern Film Festival is held annually in October and features more than 70 films from filmmakers worldwide as well as workshops and panels. The 2005 festival will be held at Muvico Theater in downtown Memphis’s Peabody Place October 21-27.