Tonight's program features a collection of films and videos that trace gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality with inventiveness and subversive imagining. In an engrossing act of mutilation, Pin Pin Tan's Microwave (2000, 3 mins, Color, Video) comically scrutinizes our sick fascination with America's favorite doll. Ximena Cuevas describes her Natural Instincts (Mexico, 1999, 3 mins, Color, Video) as "a video of musical terror where I superficially look at one of the Mexican phenomena that horrifies me the most: internalized racism, being ashamed of one's own roots, the fantasy of waking up white." Sixteen-year-old Julie obsesses over double-eyelid surgery in Jane Kim's playful exploration of cultural beauty standards, wide-eyed (Canada, 2000, 8 mins, Color, 35mm). Shamiran Samano's rhythmic and visually confrontational East (1998, 9 mins, Color, 16mm) delves into issues of queer identity in the Middle Eastern community. A young girl lures a stranger into a dangerous game of intrigue and eroticism in Maria R. Berns's Historia Minima de una Seduccion (Minimal Story of a Seduction) (1993, 8 mins, B&W, Video). Incorporating resonant music and verse, Shirin Neshat's video installation Fervor (2000, 11 mins, Video) is a sumptuously filmed meditation on the mystery, power, and cultural taboo of sexual polarities. Rosa Lau's haunting visual poem In the Dark (1999, 3 mins, B&W, Video) probes the body in its symbolic context and touches on motifs of time and oppression. Lawan Jirasuradej's la vida: The Strength Within (1996, 20 mins, Color, 16mm) is an evocative cross-generational depiction of women's personal life journeys from birth to aging. An intricately woven film on Arab identity and gender, Parine Jaddo's Aisha (1999, 32 mins, Color, 16mm) depicts a woman's struggle between traditional values and the American dream, resulting in a lyrical feminist fantasy of an idealized East.-Nirmala Nataraj