Sunday April 14, 7pm, $5

Rachael's film night presents:
Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story

With Director Garrett Scott in person In 1995, Shawn Nelson, an unemployed plumber from San Diego, CA, stole a tank and ran amok through his home suburb of Clairemont. "Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story" investigates the tank rampage and the decline of a 20th century suburban landscape that's "reached the end of its useful life." The film examines the origin of Nelson's desperate act in the context of a particular place.

The removal of Cold-War industries has left Clairemont's residents displaced from a world once familiar. In high-tech, post-industrial California, Clairemont's residents appear as "backward," working-people: a class of Californian throwaways normally viewed as criminals on televised police programs. Cul de Sac chronicles an hallucinatory experience of the California Dream and its dystopic future. (2001 directed by Garrett Scott)

"Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story hinges on chilling video of Shawn Nelson, an army veteran and unemployed plumber, speeding a stolen tank through the residential streets of Claremont, California, in 1995. Throughout Garrett Scott's terse, scrupulous film, the footage punctuates a bleak tale of a defense-industry town's boom and bust-once a Cold War capital of airplane and missile production, the San Diego suburb has decayed into a strip-mall wasteland, dotted with jobless tweak freaks. (Scott traces Claremont's speed epidemic back to World War II, when the U.S. government kept its Pacific-theater pilots awake with liberal doses of methamphetamine.)"

Village Voice for info : rachael@akpress.org