About The Flew
A mechanical man, within an elaborate shooting gallery at a Victorian carnival, lives beyond his monotonous existence. He falls in love with a broken down ride, The Wooden Embalmer, his only view outside his window. The afflicted beekeeper’s role in the shooting gallery and his dreamy hallucinations vacillate until they are almost indistinguishable.

About Clifton Childree
Born in 1971, in Birmingham, Alabama to an ex-nun who played the clarinet in the family washtub bass/banjo band, Clifton Childree packed his bags and moved to South Florida at the tender age of one. Eventually taking up playing the washtub bass himself, he was interested in making stuff and not sitting in a classroom: "The only time I was interested in going to school was in the 3rd grade when I tried to build a helicopter to fly to school". Around the same time, he was experimenting with a player piano, making his own rolls and recording sounds while hiding inside among its strings and mallets for hours on end. He also became interested in the horror genre around this time and started to keep a notebook of gory special effects he later planned on using.

In the 6th grade, he financed his first Super 8 film, The Red Caped Killer, by mowing lawns. It was shot in the woods behind his house and it had, as his notebook dictated, a very bloody ending that continued well into the credits. However, Clifton was too scared to pick up the film from the local developer after he found out that the man working there “was a real life hunchback.” Clifton's infatuation with classic horror movies may have been his motivation to make his own film, but in this case it was also his downfall, because no one-including Clifton-ever saw the developed film.

Shalonka Man-made when he was 13 years old-is an “Ultra Man” style spoof featuring many inventive characters and a must-see goofy break-dancing finale. The fact that the controversial "Death Cereal" segment was censored at the film’s premier during his middle school assembly only added to the film's cult popularity.

Choosing travel over college, Clifton ambled about here and there, teaching surfing and refurbishing an old row house in England. He lived under a pier for a time and built his own surfboards in California, and later traveled to Costa Rica to surf (he very much liked to surf). He eventually landed back in Florida, where he worked for a taxidermist all the while he planning to open a coffee house of his own so that like-minded folks might congregate under the same roof. The Mudhouse became a home for film, punk rock, coffee, art and people, who, before it opened, never left their homes.

Focusing more on films, Clifton opened Theatre 1225, a venue that showcased art and horror films. Two more Super 8 films were made at this time, The Automatic Lunch Box is a mechanical kaleidoscope set to a classical score and How to Catch the Flew, which actually shares little more than the name with The Flew. He experimented with 16mm film and wrote a three-page run on sentence that was the "screenplay" for the 6-year project, The Flew.

Clifton was a 2004 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellow, which was most helpful in funding his most recent project, She Sank on Shallow Bank. A collaboration with dancer Nikki Rollason and musician Dan Hosker, this short film is about a girl who washes up during low tide and her magical post mortem interactions.