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1-9 of 9
- Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.
- Terminally bored recent widower Si Foster, an eccentric puzzle of a man (and self-proclaimed eggplant connoisseur) is terribly lonely. His daughter Sonya was kidnapped two years prior and, for reasons unknown to her, the ransom somehow wound up never being paid. As the Fourth of July approaches and Si finds that he has virtually no one with whom to celebrate the holiday, he finally gets up the nerve to contact the kidnappers through their intermediary. He agrees to pay the ransom with an inheritance he was left and is soon reunited with her...only to find that she has accepted her captors as her new family, and has grown to love them as such. Alas, the oddball Si is clueless and inept in interacting and trying to re-establish his relationship with her. But Sonya has a few tricks up her sleeve to get him to reveal why she was seemingly abandoned two years ago...with the help of some strange cargo she has brought back home with her!
- This short film, a personal semi-autobiographical tribute to the early narrative work of filmmaker Louis Malle, tells the story of two brainy 18-year-olds, recent high-school graduates with fine future prospects, who get married and divorce one year later at age 19. Charles, a tweed-clad "old soul," must reconcile being a teenage divorcee as he attempts to forge a relationship with a new girlfriend, a young single mother. The film is set to the music of 30's French cabaret sensation Charles Trenet.
- Flamboyant Max Plugin is a jaded relic of the 1960s who has never really grown up. In his teens, Max ran away to northern California, where he met Teschlock, a charismatic ascetic and guru renowned among a small group of young followers. Teschlock asked Max to join him and his disciples on an ashram in India, Max declined and returned home to his family. Now, forty years later, at age 57, Max takes a journey to India to find Teschlock's unknown grave-site, and also himself. His adventures in India, and his Castaneda-esque experiences back home, form the heart of this very unusual road movie.
- Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra who has perfected his freakish steel-trap memory. As a result, however, his apartment has become an unlivable and unsanitary place. He goes out to find some cleaning supplies, only to find himself lost in a city he no longer knows. By shear happenstance, he bumps into an old friend, a world-class cut-up, who takes him to a place of importance to their past. There, Schweitzer realizes he must reconcile with the brother he has not spoken to and has refused to understand for most of his life.
- A young woman named Emily has just arrived in New York from Pittsburgh and has recently changed her name to Chazz. Jobless, she responds to an ad involving parrot-sitting for a Manhattanite going out of town, and must weather the emotional repercussions of the humiliating thing she decides to do while cooped up house-sitting, which precipitates in her eavesdropping on the neighbors, all the while having unreciprocated conversations with the parrot.
- This is a short, autobiographical essay film about using art as an escape from the limitations of a speech impediment. Filmmaker Daniel Kremer explores and parallels how Spalding Gray, the renowned monologue performance artist, used his own creative life as an escape from his own depression. An analogy is made to how the filmmaker used cinema to escape the pain of his stuttering disorder.
- Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.
- Two roommates well past their prime frustrate each other and struggle with sharply differing perceptions.