Artist in Person Every film tacitly promises that you'll have something to look forward to. Embedded in this notion is an obdurate clinging to linearity; time sweeps forward and so too must the mechanism of storytelling. Anne Maguire, a locally based media artist, wanted something to look back on when she commandeered a feature-length sci-fi film and re-edited it backwards. That's right: cut for cut in reverse order. The effect of this roll reversal is staggering, a vertigo of viewership. As the narrative unfolds, every action followed by its stimulus, every comment by its query, you find yourself in a dizzying spin, grasping desperately for causal certainty, yet firmly held by the reversibility of suspense. The story itself is a biotech thriller about a research team trying to identify, then neutralize an unknown virus that is killing people. Following the team's incremental progress, the original film's discrete structure is the perfect foil for Maguire's antidote to directionality. Humorous, eye-opening and outright hallucinatory, Strain Andromeda, The could be the end of cinema as we know it. Or just the beginning.-Steve Seid