2016 Feature Films and Short Films

FEATURES

Autumn Fall

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Ingvild should have known Jeppe would be trouble from the word gå (Norwegian for “go”).

The old thespian shows up drunk as a skunk at the theater she directs, railing from the cheap seats about how her actors can’t act. Soon Ingvild finds herself at Jeppe’s apartment nursing his hangover, learning of his illustrious career, and, before long, making love to him. Little does she know they share an almost preternatural affinity for a reason: they have a history. Jan Vardoen’s bittersweet, beautifully acted drama goes down as easy as a lingonberry-filled krumkake.

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Beach Town

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Inspired more by films like People on Sunday (1930) than Frankie and Annette, Beach Town is a rock and roll beach movie of the mind – a quiet, unabashedly atmospheric look at the lives of young people whose art is ineffably linked with their surroundings in a low-rent coastal community.

Beach Town features an upbeat summertime soundtrack and was shot entirely in Seattle in glorious, Super 16 color film.

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Best and Most Beautiful Things

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Michelle Smith is a legally blind young adult affected by Asperger’s syndrome.

She is also unusually thoughtful and intelligent, and lives under the care of a supportive mother who sends her to a renowned school for the blind. Michelle thus faces both daunting challenges and great expectations. This sensitive doc by Garret Zevgetis follows Michelle as she deals with her unique place in the world in ways that are often daring, shocking, capricious, and funny. Though it is one extraordinary young woman’s story, the film’s lessons about the importance of both testing limits and coming to terms with them are universal.

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Black Mountain Poets

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Jamie Adams’ tale of two inept con women posing as superstar poets comes to us from the absurdist fringe of British comedy.

On the run for petty theft, Lisa and Claire have a chance encounter in the wilderness with the famous Wilding sisters. They end up stealing the sisters’ car along with their identities, arriving in their stead as guests of honor at a poets’ retreat in the Black Mountains. There they take turns delivering daft, off-the-cuff verse and competing for the attention of hunky poet Richard. If you love the improvisational humor of The Office and the dysfunctional train-wreck humor of Absolutely Fabulous, this one’s for you.

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Borealis


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Jonah’s gambling habit has left him with a massive debt and a gift for deception.

He lies compulsively to his creditors, his long-suffering girlfriend, and his teenage daughter Aurora. Rather than confront Aurora with the growing seriousness of her vision disorder, he persuades her to skip town with him on a road trip to see the Northern Lights. Jonah’s on the lam from his bumbling loan sharks, from Aurora’s diagnosis, maybe even from himself. Producer/writer/star Jonas Chernick applies a light comic touch as Jonah tries to make it to the Borealis while regaining his daughter’s trust and saving his own skin.

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Cheerleader

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Films about the cliquish world of high school girls typically veer toward an attitude of bemused detachment.

They rarely try to get inside their subjects’ heads, which are assumed to be unburdened by deep thoughts. Watching Irving Franco’s Cheerleader is like reading the homecoming queen’s diary. There are moments of vacuity and narcissism but also of pain, longing, and insight, as cheerleader Mickey seeks to make her boyfriend jealous by getting with the school’s notoriously nerdy nice guy.

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Chicago Rot

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After years of rotting in Joliet, Les, a wrongfully imprisoned street legend known as “The Ghoul,” is released into a mad search through Chicago’s back alleys for the man who slaughtered his mother and robbed him of his soul.

Aided by enigmatic benefactors, he must delve beneath the city into a modern labyrinth of gutters whose tendrils have grown deep while he was gone. What unfolds is a desperate tale of brute force tragedy set in the supernatural underworld of Chicago, where heroes are reduced to horror-shows, villains dream of their own demise, and good and evil prove to be antiquated concepts.

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Claire in Motion

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“If a tree falls in the forest …” Any kid can complete the old thought experiment.

When Claire’s husband Paul takes a routine hike in a routine forest and doesn’t return, she’s faced with a more troubling conundrum: do even our closest loved ones exist when we don’t see them? Paul’s disappearance reveals a world of his that Claire never knew, much of it centered on a charismatic young artist named Alison. As Claire and her pre-teen son Connor seek clues to Paul’s whereabouts, the mystery of what became of him is overtaken by that of who he was. Bay City native Betsy Brandt stars in this affecting drama co-directed by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson.

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Creedmoria

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This coming-of-age story set in Queens, New York, in the 1980s follows Candy, a waifish teen who hides her vulnerability behind a veneer of toughness.

She’s got a job at the local burger joint and a boyfriend with bedroom eyes and an Elvis sneer. It has all the makings of a John Hughes comedy, except for Candy’s abusive mother, her two troubled brothers (one sexually confused, the other institutionalized), and the collection of psychiatric patients who roam Candy’s neighborhood like town criers. A retro romp with a modern twist from writer-director Alicia Slimmer.

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Delinquent

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Like a lot of teenage boys, Joey worships his father, Rich, who happens to be a career criminal.

Joey yearns to follow in his dad’s footsteps, so he’s thrilled when Rich invites him to serve as lookout for the crew on a heist. Things go very wrong, leaving Joey burdened by guilt and paranoia. As the cops close in and the criminals begin to break ranks, Joey is torn between loyalty to his father and a desperate need to cleanse his conscience. Kieran Valla’s haunting crime drama features a standout performance by up-and-comer Alex Shaffer as Joey.

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Donald Cried

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With sudden passing of his grandmother, Peter Latang returns to his hometown and encounters his long lost, childhood friend, Donald Treebeck.

What begins as a simple favor, turns into a long van ride into their past.

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Gutboy: A Badtime Story

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In a fairy tale world of ugly puppets, a mermaid and a policeman’s daughter wrestle for the affection of a skinless fisherman and for the skin the girls have traded since birth.

Along the way strings get tangled and brains get swapped till no one’s sure who’s who. There’s a lot of wrestling in Gutboy, and more people get skinned in a day than Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs skinned in a whole week. There’s also a prostitute chorus, an alarmingly fecund hag, a cannibalism scene more joyous than anything this side of Romero, and much more. Someday scholars will debate whether the collective fates of Plop the clerk, Kug the cop, and Besto the capitalist anticipated the decline of the Western security-industrial complex. For now, as long as films like this one continue to be made the world will be okay.

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The Hollywood Shorties

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The prospect of little people playing professional basketball might seem a tad oxymoronic.

But in the 1980s a group of 4’9”-and-under Hollywood actors scored a gig entertaining crowds at Lakers halftime shows with their hoop skills. At first it was a lark, with the Shorties’ bouts against the Lakers cheerleaders punctuated by interludes of naughty hijinks. But a lot of these guys had game, and soon the team faced a crisis of identity: were they athletes or entertainers? Ryan Steven Green’s stellar doc chronicles a group struggling to reach its full potential and to be taken seriously by a society grappling with its own representations of difference.

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Mad

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What happens if sibling rivalry escalates right into adulthood, even as the siblings are expected to take responsibility for an aging and troubled parent?

They lock her up in a psych ward, as sisters Casey and Connie do to their mother Mel. Casey is an underemployed loner who trolls the local bars for sleeping partners. Connie has a job and family but is equally messed up, as a work scandal threatens to land her in jail. And Mel’s recent suicide attempt betrays a plea for attention from her self-involved daughters. Robert Putka’s dark comedy-drama rides on the question of whether its three principals can reach some rapprochement before killing each other.

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Neptune

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Hannah is an orphan raised by a devoted, domineering priest on a small island off the coast of Maine.

She seems destined for a life of religious service until she witnesses the sudden, senseless drowning of a classmate, testing her faith and jarring her sense of self. As summer approaches Hannah seeks work and solace with the dead boy’s fisherman father, Herb, who helps Hannah cut loose from her parochial moorings and introduces her to the life of the sea. Derek Kimball’s somber and dreamlike debut recalls the early Terrence Malick, with a revelatory lead performance by Jane Ackermann as Hannah.

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Operator

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Tech geek Joe Larsen thinks anything can be quantified, even feelings.

When his company is hired to program the ultimate customer service bot, they bring Joe’s emotionally intelligent girlfriend Emily in to do the voice acting. Joe sets about coding what is most comforting in Emily’s voice and manner, and soon finds himself relying on his digitally-distilled cyborg Emily to soothe his panic attacks and provide him with companionship. Logan Kibens’ comedy follows Spike Jonze’s Her and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina in subtly exploring the dynamics of intimacy in a cybernetic age.

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Tear Me Apart

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British director Alex Lightman’s first feature is a dystopian fantasy with Biblical and primordial echoes.

In the aftermath of some unnamed apocalypse, in a near deserted coastal landscape, two brothers forage for food and await the return of their long absent father. Their traps and fishing lines empty, one brother resorts to killing and cannibalizing any man they happen upon. Into their midst wanders a young woman, perhaps the last on Earth, also seeking her father. Around this orphaned and limboed triad, this dramatic set piece opens onto foundational questions of sexual desire, fraternal love, taboo, and survival.

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Who Is Lydia Loveless?

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Lydia Loveless is a rock and roll prodigy from Columbus, Ohio, who began making records and touring when she was barely out of her teens.

With her tiny frame and her voice as big as all outdoors, she’s assembled a band of veteran musicians whom she leads with confidence and charisma despite her relative youth. Gormen Bachard’s film combines interview and performance footage to give insight into the exacting creative process of a musical savant. It also goes beyond the typical music documentary in asking how great music continues to be made at a time when traditional mechanisms of music sales and marketing have collapsed.

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Yallah! Underground

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Across the Arab world a loose network of young musicians combines traditional Arabic music with rock, rap, and electronic sounds, evading both the orthodoxies of the older generation and the bland internationalism of mass culture.

Farid Eslam’s documentary surveys some of the Arab underground’s most powerful musicians and gives voice to their social and political aspirations. It follows the musicians through the years leading up to and following the Arab Spring, as their naïve hopes for democracy and freedom give way to the realities of theocracy and sectarianism.

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MICHIGAN SHORTS:
Saturday, Sept. 24 @ 10:30am
Delta College Planetarium

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Immerse

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Let the natural light and sounds take you on a journey through five Italian cities.
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Painting Pilfinger

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A forgotten hero searches for salvation through a friend who may or may not be real, as an unlikely relationship with a stray dog blossoms into a chance to rediscover purpose in a painting of his mysterious companion.

But newfound hope may have painful consequences.

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Pucker Up

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Frank Maxwell, a lazy call center employee, has coasted through his entire career.

When a new boss steps into the picture, Frank tries to do all he can to make his new boss like him, even if that means going to the extremes.

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Natasha

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A teen is misunderstood by everyone.

At least he has Natasha.

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Crook’d

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Career criminals Loretta & Harold think they’ve hit the jackpot at large home in the dead of winter until Jackson shows up looking for his aunt.

Loretta assumes her identity, but there may be more to the story in this whimsical film about deception.

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Morbus

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The inception of a virus from the bacterium of deep sea creatures is released among the public which transforms them into the living dead.
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The Scorpion Tail

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Daughter of a crime family takes matters into her own hands in this Film Noir thriller.
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The Quiz

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A cultured couple foolishly decides to take a relationship quiz on their honeymoon.
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SHORTS PROGRAM 1:
Friday, Sept. 23 @ 2:00pm
Delta College Planetarium

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My Luchador

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The Mexican wrestlers known as luchadors only remove their masks in defeat.

The one in Shea Sizemore’s touching comic short still wears his mask even though he’s aged out of the ring and into an office job. A cubicle’s no place for a luchador, but with the help of his loving wife he might just get back out on the mat.

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Rotatio

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One of art’s great gifts is its power to help us move past (or better, through) our traumas.

Among painstaking ticks of a Sharpie marker, artist Shannon May McKenzie hides and reveals details of a critical life event in this cathartic performance filmed by Ian McClerin.

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The Border

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In the wake of global chemical warfare, a military fortress in Northern England serves as a last bastion of civilization.

Snipers kill outsiders to protect the stronghold from a mysterious virus transmitted by contact. But when Captain Thomas meets a familiar face at the border he is led to question the whole scenario.

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Tampoon

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Cultural critic Camille Paglia contends that men spend their whole lives struggling to emerge fully from the chthonian abyss that is woman.

Sean might well agree after an overactive tampon in Miranda’s vajayjay reels him in like a 30-pound walleye.

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The Disappearance of Willie Bingham

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Good news: it’s the future, and Australia in its infinite humanity has abolished the death penalty.

Bad news: instead those convicted of capital crimes must give an arm and a leg, and then some. The “disappearance” of the title is literal in Matthew Richards’ film about a man who’s not what he used to be.

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C.T.R.L.

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Being a character in someone else’s video game could get tiresome very quickly, but if you’re paired up properly with a potential love interest it could also be a lot of fun.

Watch Sophie and Tom losing control and loving it in this delightful short from U.K. filmmaker Mariana Conde.

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I Wanna Be in All Your Movies

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Aaron and Joey are on hiatus again.

Joey’s served as muse and co-star of Aaron’s short films through the course of their mercurial romance. Now Aaron’s demoted her to a bit part in his first feature. This making-of film with a love story subplot asks if these two will rebound and finally take leading roles in each other’s lives.

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Something to Say

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Chances are that on any given night somewhere in the world there’s a great rock band playing its last gig.

Hugs are shared, tears are shed, and petty grudges are set aside as the band lays into its first licks. From this film’s opening shot of a lone guitarist sitting on an amp outside the graffiti-scarred entrance of a Madrid club, you can tell it’s going to be one of those nights.

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The Urge 2: It Lies Within

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The vampire never really has a chance in this one.

Maybe it’s the townspeople’s faith that does him in, or his habit of passing gas right before he takes his meals, or the fact that small animals are strangely attracted to his buttocks. Whatever it is, by the end of Chris Angus’s animated short you’ll almost feel sorry for the old bloodsucker.

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SHORTS PROGRAM 2:
Saturday, Sept. 24 @ 4:00pm
State Theatre

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Dog Days

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It’s a hot summer night by a lonesome reservoir in London.

A man and a woman stroll past one another and exchange pleasantries. The water looks inviting – will these two strangers take the plunge? George Taylor’s gorgeous film is steamy and refreshing all at once.

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Susie Sunshine

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Smart girls are electric and sexy girls are fiery, but nice girls just exude sunshine.

That may sound like a slogan from an old etiquette film, but in this futuristic fantasy from Chelsea O’Connor it’s the formula for success of a ruthless corporation that’s figured out how to harness women’s powers until they burn out. But Susie’s got other ideas.

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Killer Friends

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Why do we let irritating people into our lives? And having done so, how do we remove them?

We can drop hints till we’re blue in the face, but they keep coming back like the Terminator. Sometimes there’s only one solution, as a group of friends decide in this darkly comic short from Zach Noe Towers and Tina Carbone.

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Hum

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Some of us may look forward to a life of labor-free automation, but what about the robots?

In this charming Pixaresque short from animator Tom Teller, a robot assembled from industrial detritus is liberated from a life of dishwashing drudgery with the help of a friendly hummingbird.

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Boy Toys

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What healthy American child doesn’t enjoy torturing her dolls?

Dolls are among the few groups in our society that don’t enjoy basic rights. Carson and Ken are about to learn it the hard way in this comedy from Canada via the Twilight Zone.

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Canary

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A shady young couple strolls into Midge’s gas station in the Pennsylvania coal country.

They take a liking to her knickknacks, her paintings, and her pet canary. Later, Midge finds the bird deceased, and when she ventures out to dispose of its carcass she discovers it’s not just canaries that get caged in this neck of the woods.

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Alzheimer’s: A Love Story

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Greg was a charming and talented gentleman when he was struck by Alzheimer’s.

In this sensitive portrait we watch as Michael, Greg’s partner of four decades, struggles to connect with Greg in the face of this tragic disease and to assure that Greg’s final days are redeemed by an awareness of Michael’s undying love.

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The Life and Times of Tom Thumb

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A rags-to-riches story centered on a guy with a giant thumb for a head, featuring Chinese finger traps, penile extensions, Taxi Driver monologues, and an emotional arc running from hope to desperation to redemption in 12 minutes flat.

Filmmaker Ryan Fox shows what can be accomplished with a thumb-shaped mask, a tiny crew, and an outsized gift for comic absurdity.

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SHORTS PROGRAM 3:
Sunday, Sept. 25 @ 12:00pm
Masonic Temple Red Room

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Anglers

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Fly fishing and serial killing don’t seem like professions that call for similar skill sets, but who knows?

Take a little film with the beauty and grace of A River Runs through It, throw in a bit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and you might arrive at something like this sly French short.

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This Is How I Want to Remember H.E.R.

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A young black boy is given a different kind of education when his cousin from the inner city moves in with his suburban family.
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Rye Manhattan

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Emile should have chosen a bar with a more distinctive name, maybe “Semolina” or “Pumpernickel.”

As he waits for his date at the Rye Tavern and calms his nerves with Jack Daniels and onion rings, an exchange of texts sends him on a chaotic footrace through Brooklyn.

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The Curator

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After an injury dashed Clyde Doepner’s dreams of playing Major League baseball, fate brought him in contact with the Minnesota Twins owner, who hired him as the League’s first full-time curator.

That was four decades ago and Clyde’s still at it. In Andrew Putschoegl’s doc, Clyde shares some of the treasures he’s collected along with his reflections on the game he loves.

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Aftermath

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A young woman wakes up alone with a hangover in a strange apartment.

There’s a vinyl of Beat Happening’s Jamboree, which is always a good sign. When a man arrives back with breakfast, conversation moves from awkward small talk to what happened the previous night and whether it matters. This short from German director Ralf Beyerle broaches big questions with a light comic touch.

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Omma

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There’s no love like a mother’s love. Some children starve for lack of it.

But what of the mother who’s abandoned by her child? In John Sanvidge’s somber and understated film, Miss Su languishes for the boy who called her “omma,” which is Korean for “mom.”

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Tongue Stabs Cheek

anything can happen

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Hobo prophets deliver soliloquies of love and death with Shakespearean grandeur.

God rolls his dice in a shack on the edge of town where fish heads hang from the rafters and a metronome marks time and an old TV set dances with snow. In this one anything can happen, and it frequently does.

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The Magician

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This magician can’t saw a lady in half but he can toss a sword in the air and split open her gown.

He can’t pull flowers from a hat but he can make them emerge from a knight’s nose. He’s a conjurer, like every magician going back to the medieval wizards, like the artist who conjures a rich world from layers of 2-D figures in this extraordinary animated short.

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Kaddish!

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Chance meetings at highway rest stops never go well in the movies.

This one involves a happy-go-lucky black Jew and a murderous neo-Nazi psychopath. Things look grim until a stroke of old-fashioned mysticism crosses us over into George Romero territory in this enchanting comedy-horror musical from France.

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