Professor’s movie to air on national broadcast

Assistant Film Professor Holly Hey's film "Rat Stories" was recently accepted for national distribution on PBS.

Hey said that the movie "undermines stereotypes about rats to examine the importance of human connection in a variety of social contexts. Like the rat is scorned within many cultures around the world, the human subjects within each rat story do not fit into the mainstream, and as a result of their detachments from social norms the create their own countercultures to try to belong."

Hey and her partner found a pack of rats taking shelter in brush in their backyard while living in Providence, R.I. They caught one rat in a squirrel trap and did not know what to do with it. They chose to release it in a wealthier part of town to give it a better life. Hey said throughout Providence, there were a profound number of rats in the city because of ill maintenance.

About 20,000 hours of material is reviewed annually and some are chosen for a distribution bank. Once the content is uploaded to the satellite, any affiliate can download and program the content.

The movie ran at 86 minutes, which was too long for broadcast requirements. After screening Hey's 50 minute version of "Rat Stories," they asked if she could cut it down to 30 minutes and resend for inevitable distribution. Cutting the video down was a very time consuming part of the process.

,Hey responded to a call for short films under the theme of "What Unites Us Divides Us," four or five months later. She decided to create the movie "Rat Stories" for the project. Her first version was finished in 2006, a 7-minute short interweaving multiple stories together.

"Ultimately the rats were vehicles to expose human behavior," Hey said.

To continue creating the film, Hey was given a grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. .

She proceeded to find professors and scientists who studied rats and were able to offer information as to their behavioral patterns.

Hey also found a group called "dratters," a spiritual group who participate in an event called Drowning Rat. This group met at Burning Man, an annual art event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

"Every year they get together and build a rat effigy. They dress up and do a performance ritual around it, symbolically offering the rat a number of things, then carry the rat to the river and release it to rid negativity," Hey said.

Dratters were only one aspect of the types of people Hey exposed in "Rat Stories." Hey states, "In all my work I try to undermine stereotypes, give visibility to people that aren't normally given visibility."

This movie is Hey's first documentary piece.

"I was really learning to express myself in this process," Hey said. "In the movie I was really interested in working with multiple documentary forms so each chapter is designed to reflect a particular form. It was really an exercise in technique. Before this, I would have considered myself an experimental filmmaker, but in many ways it is my most experimental piece, an uncomfortable new process."

"Rat Stories" has been screened in Rhode Island and is planning on being broadcasted on WGTE, Toledo in September.

There is also a screening of "Rat Stories" planned in the fall at one of the oldest micro cinemas in the U.S. at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, where the 30 minute version will be shown.

Hey also plans on having a local public screening of the 30 minute version in the near future.

Hey describes herself as, "an independent filmmaker and an experimental weaver

of media who strives to provoke active relationships between her cinematic art and the diverse audience it reaches."

Hey's work is inspired by post-modern and queer theory, experimental, personal, structural and feminist film. She employs variety of practice including single-channel work, mixed-media and installation art as well as live performance and multi-media integration. She says, "Each practice is a unique opportunity to intersect or to undermine conventional methods for telling stories via the moving image."

Hey has been a professor at UT since 2006. She primarily teaches courses in film and video production. Other works of hers has been shown at the Festival of Lights in Los Angeles, the Denver National Film Festival, the Onion City Film Festival in Chicago, the Vancouver Queer Film and Video Festival, among other national and international venues.

Currently Hey's video installation "Burning the Maples" is running on the first floor of the Secor Building at 425 Jefferson Street for the rest of the month.

To view scenes from the video as well as the trailer for "Rat Stories" visit www.ratstoriesmovie.com