Part of Bijou Film Board's Film Forum series.
FREE for UI students (present student ID at box office) and $6.50 for the general public.
Film followed by post screening discussion.

"Deborah Stratman has created a beautiful medidation on militarized culture, an elegant, logical strand, an oasis in a festival of generally more hurried times." - Paste Magazine

"A bracingly refracted survey of America's landscape and obsessions." - Wexner Center for the Arts

"When she raises her camera, seeing is already thinking. In all her work there is a quality of watchful attention, an outraged politic, an experience lived through the body and searched out again through her camera double." - Millennium Film Journal

Shot entirely at night, In Order Not To Be Here confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. An isolation-based fear. A fear of irregularity. A fear of thought. A fear of self. By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness, an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.

While channeling our national psyche, O'er the Land is interrupted by the story of Col. William Rankin who in 1959 was forced to eject from his F8U fighter jet at 48,000 feet without a pressure suit, only to get trapped for 45 minutes in the up and down drafts of a massive thunderstorm. Remarkably, he survived. Rankin's story represents a non-material, metaphysical kind of freedom. He was vomited up by his own jet, that American icon of progress and strength, but violently purging does not necessarily lead to reassessment or redirection. This film is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough way that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst.