I don't call myself an artist. Those aspiring to be "Artist" risk becoming as "legends in their own minds". Best to let others, the world, decide what to call you. In the meantime, let's stay busy sloughing off self images, expectations, baggage that obscures primal receptivity to the fertile void, source of all creation, and its hilarious offspring, the singing womb of the Poetic Imagination.

"The only Art created by conscious mind is dead Art."

My filmmaking journey didn't began after the sudden death of my beautiful young daughter Zoe in late 1992. The worst thing that could ever happen to me, happened to me. Great losses sometimes come with gifts and, this loss gifted me with vision. The eyes of my eyes opened. I saw "death" as an illusion, an intellectual symbol for fear, social control, and oppression. I saw through the lies of society and glimpsed the eternal cycles of Life. People come and go but Life continues. I saw how we are all, at essence, Love; I've seen true Love trump Death.

Waves of grief and epiphany guided the scripting and production of my first feature, THE ORACLE (1993), about a cynical patriarch whose granddaughter, Ariadne, appears in his dreams as a guide on his final night on earth. As my own cynicism withered I became inspired by my friend Rob Brezsny's ideas of the interface between dreamtime and daytime realities. Together, we wrote and produced THE DRIVETIME (1995), about a federal time-travelling librarian from the year 2023 returning to 1999 via the dreams of a Seattle video activist shooting police riots. When the injustices of media scapegoating finally got my goat, I made TRAGOS (2000), as a cyber-noir witch hunt pitting an urban tribe of technopagans and a fundamentalist Christian attourney who paints them in the media as a satanic suicide cult.

"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed,
but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans
fought each other to a standstill." -- Robert Anton Wilson

The racial profiling immediately following the 9/11 attacks in NYC outraged the making of HYSTERIA (2002; written with Jakob Bokulich), about a Croatian Catholic soldier who naively mistakes a drug-induced hallucination for a visitation from the Holy Virgin Mary with disasterous consequences. After my fiftieth birthday fifty, I returned to my Finnish roots in UNDER A SHIPWRECKED MOON (2003), a supernatrual ancestral saga of a Finnish-American family visiting their hospitalized, comatose patriarch whose true love appears to him in dreams and beckons from the great beyond. The conflicts I have seen ravage mothers who yearn to be artists, and artists who yearn to be mothers, came to fruition in THE GREATER CIRCULATION (2005), a poetic docufiction set in Paris circa 1908 where Rainer Maria Rilke transforms his lament over the sudden death of his dear friend, the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, into his epic lament, "Requiem for a Friend".

The national politics of terror (thanks to GWB) triggered the making of my dark comedy, THE MIND IS A LIAR AND A WHORE (2007), where a quirky Berkeley household grapples the slippery slopes between actual and perceived threats during an alleged bioterrorist attack in their city. My lost sense of enchantment was restored in THE INVISIBLE FOREST (2008) where an insomniac theatre director (whom I portray) undergoes hypnosis in an attempt to stop reoccuring nightmares involving the ghost of the mad Surrealist playwright, Antonin Artaud.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

Completing feature film projects is exhilarating and exhausting. Between these crazy-making adventures I do next to nothing for months at a time. In these creatively fallow periods, I return to my paratheatre roots for recovery and sustenance. These paratheatrical processes have also inspired several video documents: ARCHAIC COMMUNITY, 1992; CRUX, 1999; ORPHANS OF DELIRIUM, 2004. Sometimes I find renewal in crafting shorter works such as INERTIA, 1994; LILY IN LIMBO, and 1996; ROADKILL, 2001. Poetry also redeems me and I enjoy crafting "videopoems" using text from my favorite poets (Rilke, Neruda, HD, Rimbaud, Plath) as oblique narratives.

"Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning. I do
not read this as a pessimistic statement but a declaration of autonomy
for my imagination & will and their most beautiful act of bestowing
meaning upon existence itself." -- Hakim Bey

So far, all my work has been self-funded and/or co-produced with my peers. I've never seen the point of applying for corporate grants or studio funding when I can start creating with my own resources. Though each film production differs, each one typically takes six to twelve months to complete. After years of submitting my work to festivals with little or no effect, I have chosen to bypass them in lieu of the more satisfying option of four-walling, booking my films in limited runs at west coast arthouses (also see Screenings & Bookings section near the bottom of this page); sometimes universities book my films. These screenings gain promotional support from the numerous critical reviews posted at filmthreat.com, mysticalmovieguide.com and mindjack.com. My films are also available on dvd at this webpage.

"It is essential to have Knowledge. It is also essential
to escape the Known." -- J. Krishnamurti

With the exception of my short works, most of what I do is highly collaborative and would never have happened without the talent, skill and energy of many others. I am especially grateful for the support and talents of my wife, singer/composer/actress, Sylvi Alli (since 1990) and my highly skilled editor, Chris Odell (since 2000).

At some point I would like my work to achieve more exposure in Europe and wherever people are still open to new ways of seeing. Until then, I continue making the media I have to make or burn out trying. What is success to me? Zero compromise. Money? What I spend on my next project. Fame? Grease for the publicity machines. Love? What makes life worth living. Truth? Everything beyond advertising. God? Everything beyond that.

truly,
ANTERO ALLI
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