Jim Finn, follows a South Korean video artist in North Korea who hopes to revitalize Juche cinema, somewhat inspired by a true story of a South Korean filmmaker kidnapped in the 70s to make the North Korean film industry better. This experimental satire that examines what happens when a South Korean filmmaker sojourns into communist North Korea to breathe new life into that country's flagging, propaganda-driven movie industry. Believing that cinema can prop up North Korea's Juche Idea of self-reliance, mad dictator Kim Jong-Il pulls out all the stops to help the young émigré produce appropriate films.

Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, ran the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father's cult of personality. The film's title GREAT MAN AND CINEMA comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how the Dear Leader has written, edited, produced and given acting advice in films for the last forty years. This film succinctly synthesizes the Dear Leader's directing philosophy with his feelings toward the imperialist beast at his heels. GREAT MAN AND CINEMA is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker Jim Finn).

Numerous films deal with the American Civil War, which raged between the northern Union States and the southern Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. One general who rose to become a war icon and the 18th president of the United States was Ulysses S. Grant. Director Jim Finn uses board games to reconstruct the battles and documents a divided nation full of rebellious factions. “Bloody Pond” or “The Flaming Forest” are the names given to places below the Mason-Dixon Line where many cruel and confusing clashes took place within a few years. Today only cemeteries, memorial plaques, wax museums and obelisks bear witness to episodes of the war that was to be of such vital importance for the shape of the USA today. Jim Finn’s 16mm shots are a detailed inspection of various stations to which he adds macabre anecdotes and trenchant descriptions. Statesmen, ideologists and warlords haunt the forests, ruins and riverbanks here – like the incidences of light which make the footage light up time and again. There is beauty in these images, in the trickling synthesizer melodies, too, or in the stop motion animations of complicated board games. This beauty has little in common with the dark underpinning of this conflict: deep-seated racism and an adamant belief in the right to own slaves.

Interkosmos is a musical documentary-style film about the East German space program-a program with the energy and creativity of the Soviet arts scene of the 1920s and a bit of the hippie sensibility from West Germany of the early 1970s. The story is about a failed space colonization mission called "wundertüte" and is told through narration, dialogue, letters, and period songs. A tongue-in-cheek homage to an East German space project that never was, this delightful debut feature from American visual artist Finn blends archival newsreel footage with musical interludes (think, Busby Berkeley meets Erich Honecker), to capture a genuine sense of surreal fun, as GDR astronauts venture, not merely into Earth's orbit (big deal!), but farther afield: aiming to colonise the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in the name of International Communism. Perfectly capturing the requisite tone - all the self-glorifying hyperbole and grim seriousness of the Brezhnev-era Communist Bloc - this is priceless. Look out for the Clangers-like GDR-TV animation (The Little Space Pig). Oh, and that groovy hockey team dance sequence. Jim Finn's Interkosmos, a retro gust of Communist utopianism, is set to open the New York Underground Film Festival on March 8. A cosmonaut romance set aboard a 1970s East German space mission to colonize the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, Interkosmos weaves together lovingly faked archival footage, charmingly undermotivated musical numbers, propagandistic maxims ("Capitalism is like a kindergarten of boneless children"), stop-motion animation (of a suitably crude GDR-era level), a Teutonic (and vaguely Herzogian) voiceover, and a superb garage-y Kraut-rock score (by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke). Finn's deadpan is immaculately bone-dry, and his antiquarian fastidiousness is worthy of Guy Maddin. (VILLAGE VOICE REVIEW)