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Circuit #1
Between Floors
Jen White, producer/director
Between Floors explores the human condition in uniquely claustrophobic confines. Seven elevators, seven stories: a poisonous marriage, a crippling friendship, a sardine can of strangers, a surprising discovery, and the existential fear of being alone. Read more >>
Flying on One Engine
Joshua Z. Weinstein, producer/director
Wheelchair bound, without a larynx, and diagnosed with a life-threatening aortic aneurysm, Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet now lives only so he can travel to India to perform free operations in marathon-like surgery sessions where up to 700 children receive treatment for their cleft lips and other deformities. Read more >>
God's Architects
Zachary Godshall, producer/director
God's Architects tells the stories of five visionary builders and their enigmatic creations. With neither funding nor blueprints, these builders, unknown to one another, dedicate their lives to creating architectural worlds and realms that for most of us exist only in the imagination. Read more >>
Let Them Know
Jeff Alulis, director
By the time the second wave of Los Angeles punk rock began to crest in the early 1980s, most historians had already closed the book. But things were just starting to get interesting. The music got harder and faster. Politics became integral to the scene. Police-on-punk violence and massive riots were de rigueur. The concept of 'D.I.Y.' transformed from a necessity to a battle cry and the Better Youth Organization was born. Read more >>
The Way We Get By
Aron Gaudet, director and Gita Pullapilly, producer
Beginning as a seemingly idiosyncratic story about troop greeters — a group of senior citizens who gather daily at a small airport to thank American soldiers departing and returning from Iraq, the film quickly turns into a moving, unsettling and compassionate story about aging, loneliness, war and mortality. Read more >>
Trimpin: The Sound of Invention
Peter Esmonde, producer/director
The film explores the outrageous work and agile mind of a wildly creative artist/inventor/composer/engineer. Recipient of a MacArthur 'Genius' Award and many other accolades, Trimpin (who uses only his last name) combines music-making machines and kinetic sculpture with homegrown computer technology. Read more >>
Circuit #2
Bleacher Boys
Karen Hunter, producer
This is a story of five men who shared a common dream as boys: the dream of growing up and playing major league baseball. Five men: each of whose dreams were dashed at an early age due to blindness. All are masterful story tellers whose tales become easy for us to identify with and whose perseverance we can admire. Read more >>
Dare Not Walk Alone
Jeremy Dean, director/producer
On June 18, 1964 a white hotel owner in St. Augustine, Florida, pored acid in a swimming pool filled with black and white youth conducting a civil rights demonstration. With rarely seen news footage and revealing interviews Dare Not Walk Alone uncovers the untold story of the St. Augustine movement that led to the Civil Rights Act legislation. Read more >>
Milking the Rhino
David E. Simpson, director/producer
A ferocious kill on the Serengeti. Dire warnings about endangered species. These cliches of nature documentaries ignore a key feature of the landscape: villagers just off camera, who navigate the dangers and costs of living with wildlife on a daily basis. Milking the Rhino tells a nuanced tale of human-wildlife coexistence in post-colonial Africa. Read more >>
Pants on Fire
Colin Campbell, director/producer
Pants On Fire tells the story of Brad Spoofer, a pathological liar on a quest for glory. Brad quit the Feed Barn, Etc. back in Nebraska and moved to L.A. to become a movie star. His Hollywood career, however, has been a dismal failure. To save face, he’s been telling his naïve friends back home that he’s a movie star. Hijinks ensue. Read more >>
The Reckoning
Paco de Onis, director and Pamela Yates, producer
The International Criminal Court was created to prosecute individuals for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The Reckoning follows Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, and Senior Trial Attorney Christine Chung as they issue arrest warrants for the Lord’s Resistance Army leaders in Uganda, put Congolese warlords on trial, challenge the UN Security Council to support an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, and shake up the Colombian justice system. Read more >>
Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman
Eric Bricker, producer/director
Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Visual Acoustics explores the monumental career of 97-year-old architectural photographer, Julius Shulman. An intuitive artist, outspoken critic and utterly fascinating man, Shulman is the living embodiment of the great social vision of modernism. Read more >>
Circuit #3
Automorphosis
Harrod Blank, producer/director
What if you could morph your car into a mobile work of art, and drive it down the road for all to see? Automorphosis looks into the minds and hearts of a delightful collection of eccentrics, visionaries, and just plain folks who have transformed their autos into artworks. Read more >>
3 Short Films: Song of Pumpkin Brown, Search, and Le Croisment
Brad Jayne, producer/director
After the death of his father, ten-old Pumpkin Brown is taken from his rural South Carolina home to the Jenkins Orphanage where the shy, lonely boy discovers the jazz trumpet as a way to deal with his growing grief. Set during winter 1989, Search is a thought-provoking commentary on death and dying through the eyes of a lonely African-American housekeeper, Sonora. In Le Croisment (The Crossing), Kourina, a young prostitute, and a Poet cross paths over the course of one day leading one to an ultimate destiny and the other to the cusp of hope. Read more >>
Frank the Rat
Jim Cozza, producer/director
Frank the Rat explores the deep but fragile bond between siblings who have grown apart but can’t get by without each other. One day Lisa shows up on Billy’s doorstep with a plan to save both of them: hit the road together and find Frank, the father they haven’t seen in twenty years. Nothing goes according to plan. Read more >>
Tea on the Axis of Evil
Jean Marie Offenbacher, producer/director
Syria’s intricate dance between tradition and modernity reveals itself as a range of characters. As the country is left in a diplomatic vacuum the government becomes less progressive and the fear of radical Islam grows. The film lyrically spins a tale of contemporary Syrian life amd gives a voice and face to the moderate majority. Read more >>
Traces of the Trade
Katrina Browne, producer/director
Traces of the Trade tells the story of first-time filmmaker Katrina Browne's New England ancestors, the largest slave‐trading family in U.S. history. She and her family come face-to-face with their love/hate relationship to Yankee culture and privilege, and struggle with how to take public action given all that they now know. Read more >>
When I Find the Ocean
Tonya S. Holly, writer/director
Longing for the father she lost to the ocean and having no way to say goodbye, Lily strikes out on her own beginning a journey of the spirit and of the heart. With her faith and belief that her father will guide her, she sets out with her trusty dog. With the help of a friendly tugboat captain, she follows her dream to find the ocean and to finally set her heart at peace. Read more >>
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