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Beyond The Multiplex

"BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING" -- Patience and resolve are words that come to mind when viewing Portland artist and filmmaker Christiane Cegavske's 70-minute stop-motion animation film. Cegavske took 13 years to complete "Blood Tea and Red String," which is composed of what must be tens of thousands of individually composed and photographed frames -- and that's after creating the intricate visuals. It takes a highly talented, driven animator to complete a project like this.

There's more to praise here than mere work ethic, however. One critic accurately called this wordless film "a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain"; it concerns a conflict between fancifully attired families of anthropomorphic mice and bat-bird hybrids ("Oak Dwellers") over a kabuki-like doll commissioned by the mice. The Oak Dwellers are so taken with the doll they make that they return payment and refuse to give up their creation. The mice steal the doll, the Oak Dwellers set out to reclaim it, and from there the strange, savage, at times hallucinatory beauty of Cegavske's film really takes hold.

What makes "Blood Tea and Red String" so fascinating is how the actions and outward emotions of these creatures so uncannily resemble warts-and-all human behavior. We see ourselves in this magic world the filmmaker creates, and it is both comforting and disturbing.

Cegavske will be on hand for a post-screening question-and-answer session.

It's followed by a totally unrelated (with a separate admission) screening of Martha Coolidge's "Valley Girl," which boasts an impossibly young-looking Nicolas Cage and still one of the best movie soundtracks ever (personal fave: the Plimsouls' "Million Miles Away"), radiating its '80s glory on a rare 35 mm print. Talk about two different worlds!

"Blood Tea and Red String" screens 7 p.m. Thursday at Clinton Street Theater; "Valley Girl" screens at 9 p.m.