After Life
   A film by KORE-EDA Hirokazu
After Life is a new feature film by KORE-EDA Hirokazu, the award-winning director of Maborosi (1995). Based on KORE-EDA's original screenplay, After Life explores our profound human need to discover meaning in everyday life.

After Life is set at a way station between Heaven and Earth. There, guides have less than a week to help the newly dead sift through their memories for one defining moment to take with them to Heaven.

American Astronuaut
   A film by Cory McAbee
Space travel has become a dirty way of life dominated by derelicts, grease monkeys, thieves, and hard-boiled interplanetary traders such as Samuel Curtis (Cory McAbee), an astronaut from Earth who deals in a rare goods, living or otherwise.

His mission begins with the unlikely delivery of a cat to a small outer-belt asteroid saloon where he meets his former dance partner, and renowned interplanetary fruit thief, the Blueberry Pirate (Joshua Taylor). As payment for his delivery of the cat, Curtis receives a homemade cloning device already in the process of creating a creature most rare in this space quadrant...a Real Live Girl.

Camp Stories
   A film by Herbert Beigel
It's summer in the late 1950's, and all 15-year-old David Katz wants to do is wrap himself in a protective cocoon of his beloved movies. But David's parents, unfortunately, have other ideas and send him packing off to Camp Ararat, a failing Jewish summer camp in the Poconos that is supposed to teach him about his religion. Instead, it sends him on a journey that will change his life forever.

Carpati
   A film by Yale Strom
CARPATI: 50 MILE, 50 YEARS focuses on Zev Godinger, a "proste" (ordinary Jew) who has a special friendship with his Gypsy (Rom) neighbors. In 1931 the Jewish community of the Carpathian region numbered a quarter million Jews. Today sixty-five years later there are fewer than 1,500. Zev had not returned to his birthplace of Vinogradov since he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Now, Zev makes the journey home not only to revisit his childhood memories but to bring a torah to his boyhood synagogue.

Cold Fever
   Directed by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson
   Written by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson and Jim Stark
The unforgettable story of a young Japanese business man who travels through Iceland in the dead of winter, and the strange things that happen along the way. Atsushi Hirata, a young Tokyo executive, is looking forward to his yearly vacation playing golf in Hawaii. His plans change suddenly when his grandfather convinces him to perform a memorial service for Atsushi's parents at the spot where they died: a remote river in Iceland. COLD FEVER is the story of how one young man takes a very difficult journey in order to find out something about himself.

Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day
   A film by Christopher Munch
*1996 Best Cinematography, Sundance Film Festival*
Eighty years after Chinese Laborers built the railroads that forged a new America, one of the descendants fights to save the short-line train through Yosemite Valley. To do so at the end of World War II, in an age enamored of automobiles, he must learn about racial identities, family, love and responsibility. These questions are played out here against a symphonic panorama of technology and nature. Admirably living up to the promise of his first film THE HOURS AND TIMES, Munch maps the transformation in American life with images that are at once intensely emotional and beautiful.

Cotton Mary
   A Film by Ismail Merchant
A Universal Pictures Release
Set in post-colonial India of the 1950's, Cotton Mary is the story of two Anglo-Indian sisters, Cotton Mary and Blossom, their Anglo-Indian niece, Rosie, and their tangled and complicated interactions with a British family.

Dancemaker
  A film by Matthew Diamond
Dancemaker is a film that tells the tale of this extraordinary, peculiarly American company. Cutting from stage to backstage, the film looks at the rise of Taylor from solitary child to star dancer to master choreographer. It is filled with both historic and contemporary footage of Taylor's remarkable creations and the wonderful dancers who have performed them. Interviews with current and past members of the company give the audience glimpses of the pain, joy, obsession and love that motivate the artists. The film travels with Taylor and Company from the rehearsal studio to an embassy-sponsored tour of India through a strike-threatened Broadway season. And finally, it gets to the core of Taylor's talent, as he wrestles with the making of a new dance that is the centerpiece of his company's season and of the film.

Devil's Island
   A Film by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson
From the Director of "COLD FEVER" comes a bittersweet tale of Iceland in the fifties. The Rock and Roll years visit Iceland in this raucous saga that tells of the outcast people living in barracks left behind by American forces after World War II. Specifically, it's about Baddi and Danni, two children brought up by their grandparents. When their flirty mother marries an American pilot and moves to Kansas Baddi visits her and returns to Devils Island as an Elvis look alike with a new American accent and a big car. He becomes a local hero, but his stardom soon fades, his mother divorces and this quirky family sets out on another adventure.

Don't Look Back
  A film by P.A. Pennebaker
Three decades since its initial theatrical run, Pennebaker's legendary film returns to the screen offering a behind-the-scenes account of a young Bob Dylan. This is a rare opportunity for a new generation to experience the making of a legend whose imperfect voice and soulful images had the power to transfix an audience of thousands. Directed by one of the pioneers of cinema verité, the camera follows the singer and his entourage as they combat the mass adulation, frenzied press coverage and the rigors of the road.

Eternity And A Day
  A film by Theo Angelopoulos - Released in association with Merchant Ivory Films
Eternity And A Day traces the final days of Alexandre (Bruno Ganz), a celebrated Greek writer as he prepares to leave his seaside home forever. While packing, he finds a letter from his long-dead wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who wrote about an enchanted summer day they spent thirty years ago. From that point, Alexandre embarks on a mystical journey through his past and present. Realizing that after spending his entire life chasing after the words of poems and novels, Alexandre wants one final chance to capture the lost precious moments of true happiness, even if only for one day.

Fast Pitch
   A Film by Jeremy Spear
At age 35, former Yale Art major and NY based conceptual artist, Jeremy Spear, "craving the thrill of competition," joins the New Jersey Gators, one of America's major softball teams. Chasing an old athletic dream, his journey into the little known sport of fastpitch softball brings him deeper than he first thought it would, into the heart of small-town America. Eventually he is recruited by the Ashland Abbott Labs. On a journey that brings him from rural Ohio to the Northern Ojibway territory, he meets with fans and players who have witnessed the decline of this sport that once was more popular than baseball.

Hallelujah!
  Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance
A Film by Catherine Gund Saalfield
Raised by his grandmother to be a Pentecostal minister, Athey was speaking in tongues by the age of ten, a heroine addict by seventeen, and a performance artist by twenty-three. HALLELUJAH! is Catherine Gund Saalfield's compelling look into the life and work of a gay, HIV + performance artist, who practices sadomasochistic ritual as a personal religion. Through interviews with him and his troupe and featuring scenes from his touring show in Zagreb, Croatia and Mexico City, we are witness to a man who uses excessive means to test physical endurance. Pain and taboos are strikingly confronted in this meditative and autobiographical look at damnation, sacrifice and redemption. His lavish stage productions recall religious spectacle.

How To Kill Your Neighbors Dog
   A Film by Michael Kalesniko
Michael Kalesniko wrote the screenplay for "Howard Stern's Private Parts," a Paramount picture released in 1997. He recently rewrote "Bubble Boy" for Disney which with Blair Hayes directing. He is presently writing "Bad Timing" for Steve Reuther's Bel Air Pictures.

Kalesniko has done rewrite work for Will Smith, Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito as well as Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment. Kalesniko previously wrote and directed the award winning short "Algorithms." He won the Nissan FOCUS award for screenwriting in 1990. He will next be directing "Cock 'n Bull," scheduled to begin shooting in spring 2001. His partner in Lonsdale Productions, Nancy M. Ruff, will be producing. She previously produced "How To Kill Your Neighbor's Dog."

Kalesniko was born in Trail, British Columbia, Canada. He received his B.A. in Writing from the University of Victoria in 1985 and his B.A. in film and video production from Columbia College Hollywood in 1990. He has worked at various times as a reporter, a gravedigger, a high school English teacher in the arctic and a bartender in London, England.

Jupiter's Wife
   A film by Michel Negroponte
A haunting real-life mystery story. It begins with a chance encounter in New York's Central Park between documentary filmmaker Michel Negroponte and Maggie, a beguiling homeless woman in her mid-40's. Or was the meeting chance? - for Maggie claims to have been expecting him for days. She also claims to be the wife of the god Jupiter and the daughter of the late Hollywood actor Robert Ryan. Her conversation is laced with psychic messages, bits of Greek mythology and other seemingly bizarre fictions. A complex psychological drama that is as riveting as any fiction.

Manhattan by Numbers
   A film by Amir Naderi
In his first English-language feature film, Naderi tells the story of George Murphy, a laid-off newspaperman whose unemployment checks have run out; whose wife and child have left him, and who has sold or pawned everything he owns. Unless George can come up with his back rent by the end of the day, he will end up on the street as another statistic.

Moon Over Broadway
  A Film by Hededus and P.A. Pennebaker
From the brilliant filmmakers who brought you THE WAR ROOM, DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus bring their fly-on-the-wall camera backstage to take a fresh, eye-opening, no-holds-barred look at the big bang adventure of producing a Broadway hit. The Broadway show in question is "Moon Over Buffalo," starring Carol Burnett and Philip Bosco, a comedy about a low-rent Lunt and Fontaine, hell-bent upon recharging their careers. The film features hilarious turns by its leading actors - and even funnier behind-the-scenes sequences, as everyone mounting this high-risk Broadway production goes into nail-biting overdrive. The play's director, Tom Moore, and co-producers Rocco Landesman and Elizabeth Williams, help playwright Ken Ludwig through endless rewrites and finally to opening night, which Ludwig dubs "a bar mitzvah from hell." Only those few who have been lucky enough to glimpse backstage through the curtain have seen Broadway quite like this.

L'Ange
   A film by Patrick Bokanowski with music by Michele Bokanowski
Five sequences are connected by the strobe-like effects of a hypnotic journey through corridors and stairways. A man lunges repeatedly with a saber at a hanging doll-or is it a child? A woman? A domestic scene straight from a Dutch genre painting is shattered by a smashed jug of milk. A man is in a bathtub comically scrubbing. The enigmatic movements of the characters become darkly ritualistic as they are obsessively repeated. Bokanowski's use of human models, puppets and masked figures suggest a surreal and expressionist world.

La Rencontre
   A film by Alain Cavalier
How to describe this remarkable and poignant film from one of France's most individualistic talents? Armed with only a smile and a video camera Alain Cavalier proves that you don't need any of the paraphernalia typical of modern production to make a deeply moving work. It is a simple idea: a man decides to film the first year of his relationship with a woman. In this video-diary Cavalier concentrates on objects and part of bodies as they enter the frame. Slowly we begin to fill in the history of the two lovers capturing the most intimate recesses of their life together. Shot on video, projected onto a TV monitor and then re-shot on 35mm, Cavalier creates a film with the texture of skin, so moving it trembles.

Luminous Motion
   A Film by Bette Gordon
Ten year old Phillip Davis has spent half his life joyously living on the California highways with his carefree and highly seductive mother. Every night is a road, every man is a map, and no love is stronger than the love Phillip feels for his mom. Mom is light and Mom is motion.

Other Voices, Other Rooms
   A film by David Rocksavage
Based on Truman Capote's highly acclaimed first novel, the film follows a young boys odyssey of self-discovery as he seeks to solve the puzzle surrounding his father's infirmity. Joel Sansom, a young by of 13, is summoned to a sprawling decaying plantation house in the deep South to meet the father he has not seen for nine years. On his arrival, he meets Amy Skully, the mistress of the house, and Randolph, her debauched and eccentric cousin. His father is nowhere in sight. Joel later discovers the man lying paralyzed in the attic of the crumbling mansion whereupon he begins to unravel the mysterious secrets that lie within the house.

Predictions of Fire
   A film by Michael Benson
PREDICTIONS OF FIRE focuses on the controversial rock group Laibach, the most successful East European pop cultural export of the 80's and 90's. The film also documents NSK, the art movement which Laibach belongs to. But this is not simply an arts documentary. Benson's multi-layered film (which played at the 1996 Sundance and Berlin film festivals) encompasses the history of European totalitarianism with special emphasis placed on the role of art. The film also reveals the mechanisms of mass propaganda used to trigger the war in ex-Yugoslavia.

Riding The Rails
   A film by Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell
*DGA Best Documentary 1997*
*LA Film Critics Award, Best Documentary*
The extraordinary account of the lives of 250,000 boys and girls, who left their homes and hit the road during the Great Depression. They hopped freight trains, lived in "jungles", sought employment as migrant workers or looked for better lives in the cities. Their moving articulate stories are intercut with vintage footage and a great soundtrack featuring Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers, and Doc Watson. This stunningly crafted film portrays the unforgettable rite of passage of these American teenagers, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, sometimes simply wonderful.
http://www.oven.com/ridingtherails

Rock Hudson's Home Movies
   A film by Mark Rappaport
Rock Hudson returns from the grave to expose the crushing weight of secret identity within the movies' role-playing. Cruising through a roller coaster of clips from Hudson's Hollywood movies, Rappaport's hysterical yet moving video smashes the boundaries between reel life and real life.

Same Old Song
  A film by Alain Resnais - Released in association with
Merchant Ivory Films
Simon is secretly in love with Camille. Following a misunderstanding, Camille falls in love with Marc. Marc, a charming estate agent and Simon's boss, is trying to sell an apartment to Odile, Camille's sister. Odile is determined to buy the apartment, despite the silent disapproval of her husband, Claude. Claude, an apparently insignificant man, looks unfavorably on the reappearance of Nicolas after many long years. Nicolas, Odile's old friend, becomes Simon's confidant...

Set Me Free
  A film by Lea Pool - Released in association with
Merchant Ivory Films
Nineteen sixty-three will be the year that changes the life of thirteen-year-old Hanna (Karine Vanasse). It's in a darkened movie theatre in Montreal's Mile End that she first discovers Nana, played by Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie. Fascinated by this character, Hanna fins a certain similarity between Nana and one of her teachers (Nancy Huston) with whom she hopes to develop a special relationship.

She Lives to Ride
   A film by Alice Stone
*Featuring the First Lady of Motorcycling Dot Robinson
Five prominent women motorcyclists share their passion for machinery, asphalt, and the wind in their hair. Along the way we meet a feisty 82-year-old grandmother who rides every day on her trademark pink Harley, a strait-laced advertising executive who leads a lesbian club, and a funky florist who rides to work with her pet Chihuahua zippered into her leather jacket. These women consider motorcycling a way of life.

Sleepover
   A film by John Sullivan
What teenager hasn't lied to his or her parents about sleeping over a friend's house and instead really planned to meet a girlfriend or boyfriend at a local hangout? The teenagers in SLEEPOVER are no exception. But this night of innocent fun quickly turns frightening in this coming-of-age tale. Three friends, Sean, Ken and Mark, all want girlfriends; they all want to fit in; they all need a father figure. Mark, the bully of the trio, has become the unofficial leader of the bunch. His overbearing personality escalates what could have been an innocent night roaming the streets of suburbia into a desperate fight for their lives.

Some Fish Can Fly
   A film by Robert Pappas
Narrator: "I think it goes back to Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, Anthony is fighting Caesar at sea for control of the known world, and Anthony's girlfriend Cleopatra is in a boat nearby. Just when it looks like Anthony is getting a slight advantage over Caesar, Cleopatra turns her boat around and takes off. What does Anthony do? He turns his boat around and chases after Cleopatra, deserting his own army. He'd rather chase Cleopatra than conquer the world."

Somewhere In The City
   A Film by Ramin Niami
A dark New York comedy, inspired by Maxim Gorki's "The Lower Depths," whose six central characters all live in the same Lower East Side tenement. Their loneliness brings them together in their pursuit of happiness, success, sex and of course, love. SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY captures the milieu of downtown New York City life in a contemporary style that few film have been able to achieve.

Sound And Fury
   Directed by Josh Aronson Produced by Roger Weisberg
Academy Award Nominee Best Documentary Feature
SOUND AND FURY explores one family's ongoing struggle for identity in the seldom seen world of the deaf.

Through the eyes of Heather Artinian, a precocious six year old, we are witness to a family battle over a controversial medical device, the cochlear implant, which would help Heather to hear. Some of her family members celebrate the implant as a long overdue cure for deafness while others fear it will destroy their cherished sign language and way of life.

Ten Benny
   A Film by Eric Bross
Ten Benny is a raw, emotional drama that explores camaraderie, rivalry and betrayal among a group of suburban New Jersey friends. Eric Bross, a talented new voice in American independent film, presents a striking working-class portrait of a smooth wise guy in the making, who attempts a shortcut to success but instead gets in way over his head.

The Girl
  From a story by Monique Wittig - A film by Sande Zeig
Produced by Dolly Hall
Set in Paris and starring two of France's most exciting new actresses, THE GIRL is a spare, gorgeously realized modern film noir. The story follows the spiraling affair between the film's narrator - a beautiful painter (Agathe de la Boulaye) - and a nightclub singer who she calls The Girl (Claire Keim). While their passion for each other is consuming, a relationship from the past threatens to tear them apart

The Last Klezmer
Leopold Kozlowski: His Life and Music
   A film by Yale Strom
Sixty-nine year-old Leopold Kozlowski is the last of the Polish musicians who grew up in the Klezmer music tradition of pre-World War II. Klezmer is energetic Jewish folk music originally played by itinerant bands in Eastern Europe, revived in the U.S. as Jewish Jazz or Yiddish Dixieland. This exciting documentary celebrates this fascinating man and his wonderfully up tempo music.

The Price of Air
   A Film by Josh Evans
Set in the idyllic suburban distopia of Orange, THE PRICE OF AIR is the riveting tale of Paul (Josh Evans, Born on the Fourth of July, Ricochet), an affable but clueless punk, who agrees to courier for the corrupt Mr. Ball (Michael Madsen), who’s about to take delivery of a new drug rumored to be, "More addictive than air." Against the gut feelings of his best friend D (Sticky Fingaz), Paul does the deal for the quick cash, but the supplier turns on him and D is murdered in the ensuing shootout. Paul goes on the lam with the cash and the stash, but only after promising his dying friend that he’ll flush it before Ball puts them it the street. Now on the run, Paul meets Anne, a beautiful lonely woman (Charis Michelsen) with whom he indulges in the substance.

The Taste of Others
  A Film by Agnes Jaoui
Released in association with OFFLINE Releasing
Agnès Jaoui is a screenwriter and director of formidable talent. Her buoyant, tender, and eccentric film THE TASTE OF OTHERS, introduces characters the movies tend to forget: great actresses who don't get the breaks; bored rich women with no sense of style; sexy barmaids who can find love. And, most affectingly, a mustachioed Babbitt, played by Jean-Pierre Bacri, who patronizes the arts because he wants cultural enlightenment, but who may lack the capacity for anything but kindness. Admirers of the Jaoui-scripted Un Air de Famille and Same Old Song will find this work a very funny and very French treat.

The Wife
   A film by Tom Noonan
THE WIFE tells the story of a pair of New Age-influenced therapists, Jack and Rita, and what happens one night when a patient, Cosmo, and his wildly unstable wife, Arlie, arrive for dinner -- and refuse to leave. The film explores not only the complexity of relationships but also send up the modern acceptance that counseling can provide easy answers to the age-old question of love, romance, and self-fulfillment. The film stars Julie Hagerty, Tom Noonan, Wallace Shawn, and Karen Young and the actors' astute interpretations of four out-of-control souls give the film great emotional power.
http://www.tomnoonan.com

Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern
   A film by Jeanne Jordan and Steve Ascher
*Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary*
*Grand Jury Prize & Audience Award 1996 Sundance Film Festival*
TROUBLESOME CREEK tells its story through the eyes of the filmmaker's family, the Jordan's. We learn the Jordan's history through the years, much of it filled with the trappings of classic Western mythology -- good guys and bad guys, showdowns and victories. But the showdowns they face today are not with outlaws, but with modern day economics and politics. The bank has called in the loan on the farm that has been in the family for 125 years. The Jordan family fights back with dignity, humor and intelligence. This story of resilience and courage in the face of overwhelming odds creates a portrait of an American family that confronts the very worst with their very best. TROUBLESOME CREEK is emotional without being sentimental, it is both wry and inspirational.

Other films:

Babette Mongolte Retrospective
Camp for Boys and Girls
Dallas Doll
Homo Promo
Neo Homo Promo
Resistance
Trailer Camp