Ended on 10/14/2007
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STRANGE CULTURE -
(unrated)

2007 - USA - English - 75 minutes

Directed by: Lynn Hershman-Leeson

Featuring: Peter Coyote, Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Cassie Powell, Steve Kurtz
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showtimes and tickets
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The surreal legal nightmare of internationally acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife, Hope, died in her sleep of heart failure. Medics arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz's art, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected bioterrorist, as dozens of agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, cat, and even his wife's body.
Today Kurtz and his long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, former Chair of the Genetics Department at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, await a trial date.
[for more information on the case and Critical Arts Alliance Defense Fund please log onto: www.caedefensefund.org/]
"Alternately teasing and terrifying, STRANGE CULTURE is a near-perfect alignment of subject and form. In its creative assessment of our current judicial climate, the need for artistic freedom has seldom seemed so urgent." -Jeanette Catsoulis, NEW YORK TIMES
"Younger filmmakers should be looking to Hershman Leeson for lessons on how to reinvent old forms while at the same time telling an urgently topical story. The director not only breaks the fourth wall, she reduces it to plaster dust." --John Anderson, VARIETY
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