In 1989, Jeanne Finley spent a chaotic year living in the former Yugoslavia. The slow dissolution of national identity that was to mark this historical moment is the informing spirit behind Nomads at the 25 Door. Relying on nonfiction materials but doing away with the linearity of conventional documentaries, Finley has fashioned a highly evocative work that looks at our urgent need to sustain a sense of place. The upheaval in Eastern Europe criss-crosses the tribulations of a twenty-two-year-old woman, Mickey Yates, serving a double life sentence for murder. Two issues are at stake here. The first is the notion of home or a homeland, more an image constructed in memory than an actuality, a geography. The second is the power brought to bear against the individual by the family, then by the state. Yates's declared yearning for a home, now permanently revoked, is illustrated with images of Belgrade, a cityscape of fleeting fragments. Thoroughly engaging, Nomads at the 25 Door documents the fragility of personal memory beneath the grand indifference of history. (43 mins)Preceded by shorts:At the Museum: a Pilgrimage of Vanquished Objects (Jeanne Finley, 1989). Shot in the Oakland Museum, this tape meanders through the collections questioning the disparity between an art work's worldly engagement and its final resting place in this tomb of dead objects. (23 mins) Common Mistakes (Jeanne Finley, 1986). Vintage fifties educational footage, rife with presumed naivete, plays counterpoint to social misdeeds such as racism and sexism. (15 mins)-Steve Seid