Far from the Tree

Lili, a feisty 10-year-old girl, has always swam topless. When her parents force her to wear a bikini top for a trip to the water park, she rebels: why should she hide her flat chest when her friends, all boys, don't have to?

Torrey Pines is a stop-motion animated feature film by director Clyde Petersen. Based on a true story, the film is a queer punk coming-of-age tale, taking place in Southern California in the early 1990's. Raised by a schizophrenic single mother, Petersen's life story unfolds in a series of baffling and hallucinated events. With a mother fueled by hallucinations of political conspiracy and family dysfunction, twelve-year-old Petersen is taken on a cross-country adventure that will forever alter the family as they know it.

County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.

Expecting the usual tedium that accompanies a summer in the Catskills with her family, 17-year-old Frances 'Baby' Houseman is surprised to find herself stepping into the shoes of a professional hoofer—and unexpectedly falling in love.

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

After a whirlwind romance in Mexico, a beautiful heiress marries a man she barely knows with hardly a second thought. She finds his New York home full of his strange relations, and macabre rooms that are replicas of famous murder sites. One locked room contains the secret to her husband's obsession, and the truth about what happened to his first wife.

In the poverty-stricken favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, two young men choose different paths. Rocket is a budding photographer who documents the increasing drug-related violence of his neighborhood, while José “Zé” Pequeno is an ambitious drug dealer diving into a dangerous life of crime.

A chronicle of the last year of high school as two friends set out to make the ultimate senior video.

Sixteen-year-old Billie’s reluctant path to independence is accelerated when her mother reveals plans for gender transition, and their time together becomes limited to Tuesdays. This emotionally charged story of desire, responsibility, and transformation was filmed over the course of a year—once a week, every week, only on Tuesdays.

Vijay and Pournami are two very different sort of people who first meet because of a misunderstanding. Vijay is a lazy engineering graduate unwilling to follow his passions and Pournami is an unlucky bold girl who doesn't give up on her dreams. They don't seem to find a lot of things in common at first; but as time passes more avenues open up for them to collaborate and learn from each other.

Lest You Forget

Goldie, a precocious teenager in a family shelter, wages war against the system to keep her sisters together while she pursues her dreams of being a dancer. This is a story about displaced youth, ambition, and maintaining your spirit in the face of insurmountable obstacles.

Unsatisfied with a past mistake, Chandler returns home to set things right only to find himself thrown into a late-night odyssey with buddies Jules and Ty.

Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.

In 1960, a hardy group of prep school students boards an old-fashioned sailing ship. With Capt. Christopher Sheldon at the helm, the oceangoing voyage is intended to teach the boys fortitude and discipline. But the youthful crew are about to get some unexpected instruction in survival when they get caught in the clutches of a white squall storm.

An adolescent who fancies himself a sexy and conscientious young man abuses all his friends and family in a quest for his own independence.

Aki is an adolescent who is still unsure of their identity. When Aki moves to a new school, they meet and begin to spend time with Kiita. As the two spend time together, Aki eventually comes to terms with the feelings that have been building up in their mind like stagnation.

Cady Heron is a hit with The Plastics, the A-list girl clique at her new school, until she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George.

A 16-year-old boy who spend summer with his grandparents falls in love with an older young man but when tragedy strikes, he falls into a dark hole of self-harm, lust, and loneliness.

OSTKREUZ tells the episodic story of 15-year-old Elfie, who literally and metaphorically inhabits a no-man’s-land between the two Germanies shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The film deploys a neorealist aesthetic to reinforce the difficulties confronting the girl, and by inference, Germany.