Experimental filmmaker Eric Patrick, whose work has been screened extensively in the Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia, will open the Charleston segment of the annual Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers on Friday at the College of Charleston's Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art.

His cinematic compilation of a decade's films, "Ritualized Etchings: The Experimental Shorts of Eric Patrick," will be shown at 8 p.m. in Room 309 of the Simons Center for the Arts. Free and open to the public, the screening will be followed by an interchange between Patrick and the audience.

"Ritualized Etchings" is one of six films to be showcased during the tour's stop at the Halsey in 2007 and 2008.

The Southern Circuit Tour is a respected program of the Atlanta-based Southern Arts Federation, a nonprofit regional arts organization active since 1975.

It is supported by funding and programming partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts and the state arts agencies of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Patrick, on leave from his post as an assistant professor in the radio/TV/film program at Northwestern University, has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund among others.

His movies have won numerous awards in the United States and abroad. This year, his film, "Startle Pattern," captured the Spirit Award at the Brooklyn International Film Festival as well as the Best Animated Short Award at the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival. The individual shorts of "Ritualized Etchings" are bound by Patrick's use of a low-tech shooting style and stop- motion animation, 16mm and 35mm film, time-lapse photography and hand-edited frames.

"They impose a certain amount of ritual into the process, thereby forcing me to 'be' the film for a certain amount of time," Patrick says. "The small repetitive acts of creating the frames for (one of his short films) are like saying a rosary or even a form of alchemy."

The remainder of the Halsey slate includes "The Guestworker" by Cynthia Hill (Oct. 12), "Disappearances" by Jay Craven (Nov. 2), "New Year Baby" by Socheata Poeuv (Feb. 8), "Guerrilla Radio: The Hip-Hop Struggle Under Castro" by Thomas Nybo and Simon Umlauf (March 7) and "Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil" (April 11).

For more information on the tour and a schedule of its other city stops, visit www.southarts.org.

Reach Bill Thompson at bthompson@postandcourier. com or 937-5707.