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"Born and raised in Finland, writer and astrologer Antero Alli spent most of his adult life in Portland, Oregon as a daring polymath in the underground performing arts. Making his name in experimental paratheater, Alli wrote, produced, and directed various works that toured the West Coast. He co-founded the Nomad VideoFilm Festival in 1992, and the next year he began making films of his own. When he passed in 2023, Alli left a legacy of 16 features and numerous music videos, shorts, and self-styled “videopoems” that mark him as one of the singular auteurs of the Pacific arthouse circuit.
In his vision statement, Alli said: “Each film made represents a personal dream coming true and a fulfillment of the dreams of those who join me. Filmmaking as a deep image river—flooding forth from an active dreamtime vortex where the personal awakens to the transpersonal through the lens of an insurrection of the Poetic Imagination.”
A determined opportunist, Alli’s entire filmography was produced in-house and self-distributed through Vertical Pool Productions, the collaborative art platform he created with his wife, musician Thia (Sylvi) Alli. With their budgets rarely exceeding $10,000, Alli’s films are explicitly irreverent concerning traditional Hollywood storytelling and lofty production garnish. The grainy DV-shot soliloquies dedicated to the countercultural scenes of Capitol Hill, Seattle, and Haight-Ashbury stand out firmly in an age of high-quality consumer-grade video recording technology.
In 2023, before Alli’s passing after a long battle with lymphoma, Spectacle screened his final film, BLUE FIRE, along with a virtual Q&A with the director. Now, we proudly present a posthumous retrospective of Alli’s finest works." – Spectacle