Local filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky has been making exquisite films for silent speed for over twenty years. Both the silence and the slower rate are crucial to Dorsky, for "their ability to open the heart and speak to their audience," and to flicker at the "threshold of cinema's illusion." In many ways, Dorsky's films are filmmakers' films; they are precisely and articulately about cinema's particular and wonderful qualities: the surprise of an edit, the beauty of the rectangle, a flash of light or color, movement within and between frames, connections remembered across images. But they are also about the joy of filming on a daily basis, carrying a camera in order to capture the fleeting moments of a life observed. Dorsky describes his exhilarating Variations, which premiered at this year's New York Film Festival: "What tender chaos, what current of luminous rhymes might cinema reveal unbridled from the daytime word? During the Bronze Age a variety of sanctuaries were built for curative purposes. One of the principal activities was transformative sleep. This montage speaks to that tradition."-Kathy Geritz