Roy And Edna Disney Calarts Theater

"9 Scripts From a Nation at War" is an austere, open-ended video-art installation at REDCAT. Today its creators are expanding the palette to encompass a live, five-hour performance in which a crew of fellow artists and others who are mainly nonactors will read from transcripts of a military court hearing for suspected Islamic terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In the Darwinian world of L.A. film culture, Hollywood blockbusters are the toothy carnivores gobbling up the biggest budgets and the most movie screens. Then come indies, documentaries and foreign films, quietly staking out their smaller patches of swamp (read: niche markets). Finally, there are experimental and avant-garde films and videos, wilier and brainier than the lumbering big-studio giants. But these cinematic marsupials are precariously balanced on the edges of the movie ecosystem, always vulnerable to budget slashing and spotty media coverage.