Joyful Girl

More interested in partying and flirting with young musicians than work, veteran rock journalist Ellie Klug has one last chance to prove her value to her magazine’s editor: a no-stone-unturned search to discover what really happened to long lost rock god, Matt Smith, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Teaming up with an eccentric amateur documentary filmmaker, Ellie hits the road in search of answers.

The whole family is reunited when Sofia comes back for his father's funeral. Quickly, inner problems are revealed.

“Nicky is seven. His parents are older and meaner.” A Place Called Lovely references the types of violence individuals find in life, from actual beatings, accidents and murders, to the more insidious violence of lies, social expectations, and betrayed faith. Benning collects images of this socially-pervasive violence from a variety of sources, tracing events from childhood: movies, tabloids, children's games (like mumbledy-peg), personal experiences, and those of others. Throughout, Benning uses small toys as props and examples—handling and controlling them the way we are, in turn, controlled by larger violent forces.

Set to music by Bikini Kill (an all-girl band from Washington), Girl Power is a raucous vision of what it means to be a radical girl in the 90s. Benning relates her personal rebellion against school, family, and female stereotypes as a story of personal freedom, telling how she used to model like Matt Dillon and skip school to have adventures alone. Informed by the underground “riot grrrl” movement, this tape transforms the image politics of female youth, rejecting traditional passivity and polite compliance in favor of radical independence and a self-determined sexual identity.

Luks Glück is a tragicomedy about the dubious happiness of a Turkish family between Hamburg and Istanbul, whose life by a lottery win out of joint.

Imbuing the familiar Don Juan myth with a captivating combination of comedy, seductiveness, danger, and damnation, Mozart created an enduring masterpiece that has been a cornerstone of the repertory since its 1787 premiere. The opera offers a rare opportunity for two baritones to star alongside one another as the title Lothario and his faithful yet conflicted servant, Leporello, as well as three memorable female roles—multifaceted women who both suffer the Don’s abuses and plot their revenge.

This short probes the taboos around a very particular second-hand trauma, leading us to a more universal understanding of human experience.

As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

When a tribe of cavewomen imparts cruel justice on one of their own their fate takes a turn for the worst. After discovering and falling in love with the corpse sacrificed by the girl-gang, a lone wandering giant of pre-historic mythos is inspired to homicide. Consequently the cavewomen are menaced by the heartbroken and bloodthirsty cave-brute with a grudge, and the prophetess among them is ignored when she predicts the tragic outcome.

Guy Carter, an insecure expectant father unable to find work in his field, accepts a job driving hookers around Los Angeles. One long and crazy evening proves to our hero that he is, in fact, up to the task of fatherhood.

Laura loves Simon and Simon loves Laura. But Laura does not love herself enough to let Simon closer to her. The reason being something nobody is allowed to know: she tries to suffocate any kind of feelings by giving in to eating attacks. When Simon finds out, their relationship threatens to break apart.

Two best friends, a detective and a prosecuting attorney, tackle criminal cases in a small southern town.

Beth wakes up after a night she can't remember to discover her guitar missing. She'll go through hell to get it back. But, like, after some aspirin.

Over a family beach weekend, a young women grapples with whether to confide in her family about a recent sexual assault.

Hopper Stories

Musical and mysterious, Mary Helena Clark’s Palms is a modular, sphinx-like film in four parts, comprised of two hands animating stillness, the repeated approach of headlights, a back-and-forth tennis match, and thoughts that emerge like objects.

In this horrifyingly modern fairytale lurks an online Boogeyman and two 12-year-old girls who would kill for him. The entrance to the internet quickly leads to its darkest basement. How responsible are our children for what they find there?

Three best friends endure heartbreak, humiliation & hangovers to find a date to the wedding of a lifetime.

A dark re-telling of the classic fable 'Little Red Riding Hood' set in the Canadian prairies during the Great Depression.

In the period 1891-1927, Henriette Roland Holst goes through a dramatic development. As an aspiring poet from an affluent bourgeois milieu she throws herself, full with idealism and conviction, into the labour movement. Within the various socialistic parties however, a fierce battle on direction takes place, wherein Henriette has trouble finding her place. After returning disillusioned from a trip to the Soviet Union, she does not feel at home in any leftist party. Later she will recollect on this period in her biography "Het vuur brandde voort" (translation: "The fire rages on"). The film reconstructs this period with the use of old film material combined with texts by Henriette Roland Holst herself: fragments from letters, poems, speeches and books, sparingly supplemented with personal commentary by the filmmaker.