With an astute nod to the Hayley Mills film, Julie Zando's The Apparent Trap (1999, 25 mins, From VDB) explores identity, finding that difference blurs when confronted with its mirror image. Strangely ambiguous scenes from The Parent Trap are restaged by the artist herself and Jo Anstey, her “conceptual sister,” as the twins. But this is no simple deconstruction of a twinning narrative. Zando plumbs the depths of a plot device that has startling psychological implications. Joan Braderman, artist and stand-up theorist, during an illness immersed herself in celebrity images, every day, all day, broken only by the reading of forty-seven pop bios. A self-avowed “mediaholic,” Braderman rose from her sickbed to make the hilarious Joan Sees Stars (1993, 61 mins, From VDB), a freewheeling critique of celebrity culture. Projecting herself over images of Liz Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn, and others, she riotously rants about the celebrity conspiracy, a matrix of plastic surgery, hyper-romance, manufactured crisis, and miraculous desire.