This exciting event premieres a score commissioned by PFA for the thoroughly peculiar Georgian film My Grandmother. Noted for its anarchic stylistics such as stop-motion, puppetry, exaggerated camera angles, and animation, this Soviet silent has met its match in the bold but playful musicianship of Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Beth Custer. A founding member of Club Foot Orchestra, Custer has also worked with Trance Mission, Eighty Mile Beach, and most recently, the Vinculum Symphony. For this score, she will compose for a range of woodwinds, percussion, and bass. Mikaberidze's scathing satire of Soviet bureaucracy is a genuine piece of grotesquerie from the Eccentric Cinema of the twenties. My Grandmother's most memorable character is a wide-eyed, wild-haired bureaucrat's wife who is caught up in a frenzy of bourgeois living. Her equally comic husband, modeled after Harold Lloyd, personifies the indolence and irrelevance of a State system that resembles nothing so much as a roundtable defended by benighted stooges. When he loses his job, he learns the value of a "grandmother"-a slang term for the boodle that moves the table round. Forgotten for half a century, this irreverent blast, complete with constructivist sets and deconstructivist slapstick, has lost none of its bite.-Steve Seid