Excerpted on Wholphin No 4, Hershman Leeson’s brilliant, hybrid documentary-film, Strange Culture, in which the FBI mistakes artist, Steve Kurtz, for a bioterrorist, is now available in its full, 75-minute length on DVD from Docurama.

The Washington Post writes, “On May 11, 2004, an art professor in Buffalo named Steve Kurtz awoke to find that his wife, Hope, had stopped breathing during the night. Kurtz alerted the police, and when officers and an emergency medical team arrived they found some strange things in the home: Petri dishes containing bacterial strains. A mobile DNA extracting machine. Windows covered by tinfoil. And a flyer with Arabic writing on it. In post-9/11 America, such artifacts weren’t just weird, they were suspicious. Local officials immediately contacted the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the grieving Kurtz, who with Hope had co-founded an artist/activist collective called the Critical Art Ensemble, was plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare that he still hasn’t escaped.

Strange Culture, a film that uses a mix of documentary footage, fictional speculation and animation to tell Kurtz’s story, does justice to his journey through the legal looking glass, and reinvents notions of nonfiction storytelling along the way. True to the mission of the Critical Art Ensemble, whose members use installations and performance pieces to critique biotechnology and genetically modified organisms, “Strange Culture” ingeniously marries medium to message, resulting in a provocative and often unsettling cinematic hybrid.”

Read the full review here

Buy the DVD here