Portraits from the Fringes takes a group of narrators, (Geoff Cordner, Lydia Lunch, authors Iris Berry & Zora Von Burden, Thelonious Monster singer Bob Forrest and several yet-to-be-determined others) telling stories about their lives. The stories are interwoven forming a loose overall narrative that follows these characters through the punk rock days and the debauchery of the 80s that followed as they crash and/or meander through the fringes of Hollywood, New York, San Francisco, Texas, and elsewhere on a sometimes vague and often drug, alcohol, sex, adrenaline & desperation fueled search for identity. There are side trips through the gutter punk days, living in fleabag hotels on the voucher system, peepshows, punk shows, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, back alleys, the Oki Dog stand on Santa Monica Blvd, and just about anywhere and everywhere else someone had faint hopes a good time could be found or funded.

"Celebrated Photographer Geoff Cordner has created a testament to a slice of life that is both brutal and beautiful. Through a series of short films, sexy, world-weary punk voices narrate autobiographical stories of growing up as an outsider in the 1960s & 80s, hotel hopping, and surviving on the streets of Los Angeles. Using a moving collage of black and white photography, Hotel Hopscotch lays down the laws and personalities of desperate street cultures. The junky hotels, the HIV hotels, and the mentally ill hotels are compared and contrasted with a lovingly naked eye. Survival stories of punk street kids in love are told. Tribal heroes in mohawks living off cigarettes and beer protect their own and their fleeting urban families. With self effacing honesty and raw humor, moments in youth are remembered and captured as many in the tribes die young or disappear. This is a meditation on a specific slice of punk life captured with love and honesty." -- Linda Santiman

Upcoming Festival Screenings: Hotel Hopscotch playing the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Sept 24th. Click here for more info.

Festival Screenings: SF Docfest (May 2006); Supershort Film Festival (London, UK, July 2006); Lucid Underground Media Arts/Kansas City Film Festival (September 2005).