“And I feel Fine,” a short film by Kate Walker, an associate professor in the Department of Art, Design and Visual Studies, is screening Sep. 18-27 at the Northwest Film Forum’s (NWFF) 23rd Local Sightings Film Festival, an annual festival for Pacific Northwest Film and media makers.
Walker will join a digital panel titled “Mad World” facilitated by Rana San, NWFF’s artistic director, at 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 19. Performer and Boise State alumnus Alek de Dochas, now a student in the Art and Ecology MFA program at the University of New Mexico, also is a panelist.
The Anchorage Museum in Archorage, Alaska, also has selected “And I feel Fine” for Future Ready: Survival Now + Next, a long-term publication and online project through September 2021.
The film also is screening at the Arizona Underground Film Festival through Sept. 20.
In Walker’s film, a group of young friends walks through an urban wasteland at night, headed for Disaster Karaoke at Boise’s original gay bar, the Lucky Dog Tavern. Fragments of archival material including a nuclear energy instructional video, old music videos and weather reports are layered with heartfelt apocalyptic singing in a blend of joyous anxiety.
“And I Feel Fine” includes brief interviews with the performers speaking frankly about their fears, experiences and hopes for the world they will inherit. Homelessness, climate anxiety and systematic disregard for life are some of the stories they tell. Through these anxieties, a sense of optimism persists.