In Martina's Playhouse, everything is up for grabs. The little girl of the title oscillates from narrator to reader to performer, and from the role of baby to that of mother. While the roles she adapts may be learned, they are not set, and she moves easily between them. Similarly, in filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh's playhouse of encounters with friends, objects aren't merely objects, but shift between layers of meaning. Men are conspicuously absent, a "lack" reversing the Lacanian/Freudian constructions of women as Ahwesh plays with other possibilities. Sharon Sandusky compulsively edits found documentary footage of lemmings to Wayne Newton repeatedly singing "Danke Shoen" to wonderfully capture the obsessive, "here we go again" nature of romance in C'mon, Babe (Danke Shoen). In Brute Charm, Emily Breer combines images she shot in Africa with animation on an optical printer to construct a journey through the animal kingdom. The "wilds" she explores, via a very digressive path, speak more of man ("our unsocialized selves") than animal. Greta Snider's Futility explores diminished expectations. She combines found footage with a powerful personal narration, the disjunction between sound and image echoing the narrator's unease. A woman's unwanted pregnancy, a troubled love letter intersect images of lions feeding on gazelles, and seem to question the possibility of personal fulfillment. In Decoding the Link, male and female bodies move up the screen as if on an endless scroll. Yet what we see is a film of color photocopies of the bodies. Benay Ellison's film, while a beautiful homage to the nude, is also about issues of representation, the presence and absence of an object. We gain an imprint of the world, but lose direct contact. Kathy Geritz