Ed Halter, former director of the
New York Underground,
remembers the fest in the
Village Voice:
This week, the New York Underground Film Festival is holding its 15th—and final—edition. I ran the event for 10 of those years, and it all began with the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
Right after college, while sojourning in San Francisco, I worked on that city's 1994 lesbian and gay film festival, where I was first introduced to experimentalists like Sadie Benning, George Kuchar, and Matthias Müller. That year, they also screened a documentary about NAMBLA called Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boys, a controversial low-budget provocation, seemingly designed to piss people off. Chicken Hawk stared blankly at its subject, sans editorializing. It was, in the parlance of its day, totally in your face.
Michael Jones is the film festival editor at Variety.com. 
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