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I know this year the Olympia Film Festival wanted a step back into the past. I didn’t know the event had actually made time halt on Fifth Avenue. The scene in front of Capitol Theater today looked just as it did last Friday â€" construction workers continuing to tinker over a darkened marquee.

The crack in the temporal continuum deepened with the lineup of shorts inside. The pastiche patchwork assembled instills equal parts nostalgia and embarrassment for bygone Americana. John Clark’s Video Art received inspiration from the Reagan Era’s greatest artistic contribution â€" the music video for A-Ha’s “Take on Me.” The goofy story follows a doodler who gets sucked into a frightening world where neon and mousse (hair, not chocolate) reign supreme.
Case Histories in Psychotherapy â€" Richard Part II resurrects an '80s relic, Robert Stack, and finally lays to rest that age-old question of whether he did anything besides Unsolved Mysteries.

He did.

Even the cast from Sesame Street makes an appearance. Erica Eaton’s funny narration in Network TV recounts a childhood absorbing PBS’s egalitarian world view. The boob tube even provided her with her first love â€" Laura from Little House on the Prairie. As Eaton explains in the film’s terrific closing line, "Network TV made me a lesbian.”

Zachary Iannazzi’s To Be Regained flings us into the '60s; in this period the government first implemented plans to reintroduce Atlantic salmon into the Connecticut River. Iannazzi, a self-described “avant-documentarian,” combines journalism and experimental techniques to produce some pretty striking images.

NuWa Dreams was the evening’s highlight, a lavish, heavenly portrait of a Chinese creation tale. Though shot literally in the filmmakers’ backyard, the piece emits an otherworldly aura. Directors Hirsh and Jenny Diamant cast their daughter Larissa as the lead, and David McCarthy composed the score. “It’s an important story for our times,” says Russian-born Hirsh. “It’s the story of…how creation kind of goes out of whack.”

Maybe the past deserves another look-see.   

LINK: Olympia Film Festival schedule

LINK: Weekly Volcano’s OFF cover story