Dang it! The Montreal Underground Film Festival was held last weekend (May 12-14) and I didn’t have anything on it beforehand. Apparently they showed a shitload of films. That makes May 13 probably the busiest underground film day of the year, with the American MUFF (i.e. Milwaukee) and the New Haven Underground Film Festival showing simultaneously.

Of course, being in Montreal, there was a mix of French and English-speaking films, but I don’t know if you had to speak both languages to attend. (Actually, I’m only assuming some of the films are in French based on the titles in the schedule.)

It was also a 99% short film festival, with only one feature-length shown on the last day: Elza Kephart’s Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love, which won the Best of the Fest award at the 2005 Boston Underground Film Festival. The movie is also available on DVD in Canada, but you can find some from U.S. Amazon’s sellers program.

I also found this quote on the MUFF site interesting:

An experimental film is a film organized neither as narrative fiction nor as non-fiction. As such, film scholars consider the experimental or avant-garde film to be one of the major modes of filmmaking, along with the narrative film, the documentary film and arguably animation.

I think they’re using a broad interpretation of the term “experimental film” here, but I like the sentiment.