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The Atlanta Underground Film Festival wrapped up its 7th successful year back on Aug. 29 and has given out awards to 13 feature films and 14 shorts.

Several of the winners are films that have been featured here on Bad Lit, either with a review or having been embedded on the site for your viewing pleasure. First, repeat Auff winner Chris Hansen won the Best Director award for his second feature film Endings, a film that finds three disparate strangers spending their last day on Earth together.

Loretta Hintz‘s outrageous lesbian farm fantasy The Sheep and the Ranch Hand took home the 2010 Auff The Wall award. Also, the recently embedded The Shave by Sean Christensen, a haunting memoir, won the Best Experimental Short award. And, lastly, I was very happy to see that animator Victoria Cook, whom I’ve written about in the past, took home the Best Short Short award for her Devil Town.

The 7th annual Atlanta Underground Film Festival is like having four different fests crammed into an exhaustive three days on Aug. 27-29. It’s an outrageous underground fest, an animation festival, a documentary fest and a horror movie festival: The culmination of a month of fests run by Atlanta’s Festival League. There’s tons of short films, documentaries, features and more.

There’s lots of great stuff to recommend, too. On the last night of the fest, there will be a screening of Chris Hansen‘s second feature film, Endings, which tells the touching story of three people spending their last day on Earth together. The film was reviewed on Bad Lit a few months ago. On the short film front, there’s Loretta Hintz‘s wild lesbian bestiality (sort of) tale, The Sheep and the Ranch Hand and two films by the perpetually awesome Neil Ira Needleman, Meeskit...

Rating: 7/10

Director: Étienne Sauret

We all know the sayings: “Just say no.” “Drugs are bad, mmkay?” and everything else that D.A.R.E/our parents/infomercials have tried to instill on us since we were little kids. Whether or not you abide by these sayings is another thing, but it’s a truth universally acknowledged that drugs and drug use are pretty much frowned upon. Dirty Pictures, a documentary from Étienne Sauret (Collateral Damages) relates the story Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, the man credited for discovering the effects of a little drug we all know as Ecstasy.

Read more on SXSW 2010 Review: Dirty Pictures…...

The film is never preachy, and whatever your stance on America’s “War on Drugs,” this film is an astounding and essential peak at some of its main players. Dirty Pictures Etienne Sauret Etienne Sauret’s new documentary, largely focused on the life of underground hero Sasha Shulgin and his wife, Ann, is an engrossing film and is the best documentary [...]...

Festival darling and documentary filmmaker Etienne Sauret came to discover the subject of his latest documentary through complete happenstance. While filming one of the rogue chemists who discovered the effects of ecstasy, Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin, at a press conference, Sauret became fascinated with Shulgin, the man. "Dirty Pictures" is a documentary about Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin. Shulgin's alchemy has earned him the title 'The Godfather of Psychedelics,' and a reputation ...

Festival darling and documentary filmmaker Etienne Sauret came to discover the subject of his latest documentary through complete happenstance. While filming one of the rogue chemists who discovered the effects of ecstasy, Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin, at a press conference, Sauret became fascinated with Shulgin, the man. "Dirty Pictures" is a documentary about Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin. Shulgin's alchemy has earned him the title 'The Godfather of Psychedelics,' and a reputation ...

Festival darling and documentary filmmaker Etienne Sauret came to discover the subject of his latest documentary through complete happenstance. While filming one of the rogue chemists who discovered the effects of ecstasy, Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin, at a press conference, Sauret became fascinated with Shulgin, the man. "Dirty Pictures" is a documentary about Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin. Shulgin's alchemy has earned him the title 'The Godfather of Psychedelics,' and a reputation ...

This is the first year I'll be attending SXSW and I'm already dreading it. Not because I think it's going to be a bad time by any means. I'm dreading it because every time I think I have wrangled some kind of coherent, reasonable and feasible movie watching schedule out of their behemoth-sized lineup, another film pops up on my radar that throws the whole process off axis once more. The most recent culprit? Dirty Pictures, a documentary about the life of Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, the experimental chemist who discovered the drug we all now know as Ecstasy.

Even if you're not going to be attending SXSW, I'd recommend watching the trailer for Etienne Sauret's film below, as it looks to be a bittersweet examination of one man's life and work; a man who is an underground hero to an entire culture of people (some call him "The...

Festival darling and documentary filmmaker Etienne Sauret came to discover the subject of his latest documentary through complete happenstance. While filming one of the rogue chemists who discovered the effects of ecstasy, Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin, at a press conference, Sauret became fascinated with Shulgin, the man. "Dirty Pictures" is a documentary about Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin. Shulgin's alchemy has earned him the title 'The Godfather of Psychedelics,' and a reputation ...

Festival darling and documentary filmmaker Etienne Sauret came to discover the subject of his latest documentary through complete happenstance. While filming Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin - one of the rogue chemists who discovered the effects of Ecstasy at a routine press conference, Sauret became fascinated with Shulgin, the man. "Dirty Pictures" is a documentary about Dr. Alexander 'Sasha' Shulgin. Shulgin's alchemy has earned him the title 'The Godfather of Psychedelics,' and ...