USA / 2008 / 87:30mins
director GREG KOHS
NSW premiere

Song Sung Blue is a documentary feature film that tells the alternately inspiring and tragic love story of Lightning & Thunder. Trading as the Neil Diamond tribute band Lightning & Thunder, husband and wife Michael and Claire Sardina once more or less shared a stage with Pearl Jam, and almost became world-class rock-stars in their Milwaukee hometown. But true fame eluded them in their 20-year career.

Rather than a standard white-bread-to-celeb rockumentary, Song Sung Blue takes a tragi-comic look at the delusion of celebrity, and the blinding appeal of the American Dream. Winner of both the Best Documentary and the Audience Award at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival. “Dysfunction and delusion run rife through a stranger-than-fiction saga that starts out kitschily amusing, then finds drama and pathos in its subjects’ rather hapless progress.” – Variety.

USA / 2007 / 14mins
director WITNESS and
Human Rights Center Memorial
Australian premiere

“Missing Lives” addresses the lack of accountability for the enforced disappearances of more than 3,000 people in the Russian North Caucasus.

USA / 2008 / 4 mins
director DAVID BURNS
Australian premiere

The film depicts a young man’s erotic relationship to nature. The man’s clothes are cast off, in parallel to the stripping away of the politics of American culture.

AUS / 2008 / 1:30mins
director JESSICA MUTASCIO
World premiere

A visual interpretation of what happens when the weight of one’s mind exits through the eyes.

AUS / 2008 / 7 mins
director AARON MCLOUGHLIN
NSW premiere

It wasn’t what he was expecting at Heartbreak Motel.

AUS / 2006 / 12mins
director DAVID FARNJIC

A prostitute acts as a confidant for a disturbed man who forces her to question the morals of every day people and reassess her place in life.

AUS / 2005 / 6mins
director JOHN HOBART HUGHES

The film is an open narrative, a collage of landscape and objects, a weaving of places, a rediscovery of moments, a reflection of the past, an arrival at a mound of dust, and a reinvention of self.

USA / 2008 / 3:30mins
director MAX WINSTON
World premiere

A Woodsman’s fast-paced journey, fuelled by happiness, slaughter, and a confrontation with America’s God

UK / 2006 / 23:30mins
director MARTIN RADICH
Australia premiere

Worlds collide, interactions take place. Dog’s Mercury is a microcosm of a moribund community.

USA / 2008 / 6mins
director CHRIS KENNEDY
Australian premiere

Inspired by a poem, the film is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics – the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps the significance of allowing oneself to fall.

AUS / 2007 / 8:50 mins
director KAYLA DAVIDSON
Australian premiere

Being Barry is a dark, skewed comedic tale of Australian suburbia. The suburbs you don’t see on Australian soap operas or in glossy real estate development brochures.

USA / 2008 / 78mins
director MIKE DAVIS
World premiere

One hundred years in the future... Due to overpopulation and the effects of global warming, sex has been declared illegal on Earth. When a crew of astronauts hear of a distant planet inhabited by insatiable female creatures who exist only to satisfy man’s desires, they decide to take a detour from their routine mission in search of the mythical star system known as the Sex Galaxy. Written and directed by Mike Davis, ‘Sex Galaxy’ marks the auteurial debut of the twisted mind behind cult comedy sensation and Russ Meyer grindhouse horror homage ‘Pervert!’ starring Mary Carey.

AUS / 2007 / 14mins
director TOM JACKSON
NSW premiere

In the town of Hobart, Tasmania, people are partying to the music and puppetry of Australia’s number one* mobile disc jockey, DJ Dazz.

2007 awards

Check out the 2007 archives to see those who received awards for the 2007 festival.

The trophies for the festival are created by Mark Wotherspoon, local Sydney glass artist. Since completing university Mark has set up an artist run studio in St Peters where he works and is currently completing a monsterous glass arrtwork for 'Sculpture By the Sea'. The role of the television in everyday life and themes of life, death, and existence are central to Mark's work.
These trophies, along with other works, have been cast from recycled television screens sourced from discarded TV’s on the side of the road.

The Sydney Underground Film Festival is indebted to Mark for creating these works of art for SUFF award recipents.
More information can be found at www.myspace.com/spoonglass