After touring the globe for the past two years, DJ Spooky finally arrives in Eastern Europe. His visual/music extravaganza REBIRTH OF A NATION serves as the Opening Night attraction on Wednesday, October 24, for the inaugural American Film Festival, a new film event that is the first to be solely devoted to contemporary and classic American cinema. The man himself will be there to both orchestrate the film presentation and to mix sounds at the film's after-party at the chic Club Eter.

REBIRTH OF A NATION is a film project based on a remix of D.W. Griffith's infamous 1915 film BIRTH OF A NATION, which is notorious for its depiction of blacks at the end of the US Civil War in the 19th century. To open up these images that are almost 100 years to reinterpretation, DJ Spooky has applied his dj technique to add layers to the meanings of images, while deconstructing and reimagining them. Using an audio palette that mixes hip-hop drum beats, industrial sounds, dissonant interludes and blues fragments, he creates a totally immersive experience that tantalizingly looks at the multiple dimensions that still surrounding racial awareness and tension in America (even with a black man sitting in the White House).

The presentation is a heady mix of film, music and contemporary art, using film as a "found object" much in the way that artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons have done. This unique live experience further expounds the the creative investigations inito the ideas of found objects, the power of cinematic imagery and the use of appropriation as an art technique. DJ Spooky has presented his unique program in more than fifty shows around the world......from Lincoln Center in New York, to Theatre Chatelet in Paris, to the Herod Atticus Amphitheater at the base of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. He has also presented the program at film festivals all over the map....from Australia and New Zealand to Louisville, Kentucky to New York's Tribeca Film Festival.

The American Film Festival will present nearly 100 films in total, including 20 narrative features and 15 documentary features in competition. A panorama of classic films from both the American Independent and Hollywood schools will be presented, along with some of the year's most acclaimed American indies, including PLEASE GIVE, GREENBERG and SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, which closes the Festival on Sunday, October 24.