Scanty Claus

A group of friends in a car give a ride to a stranger who will affect their lives indirectly.

This early travelogue film, made in a Kenyan train station, captures an impromptu musical performance. Some passengers eagerly join in while others sleep—blissfully unaware of the performance taking place around them.

Orson Welles pitches to potential investors his vision of a largely improvised bullfighter movie about an existential, James Dean type troubadour who sets himself apart from other matadors. In front of an audience of wealthy arts patrons, Welles pontificates on the state of cinema, the filmmaking process, and the art of bullfighting.

Several comic greats pay tribute to the legendary stand-up stage founded by Budd Friedman in 1963.

The Grand is in the tradition of improvisational comedies like Best In Show and This Is Spinal Tap. The story is set in the world of professional poker and follows six players who reach the final table of the world’s second most famous high stakes tournament, the Grand Championship of Poker.

BABYBABYBABY is a dance about dances about love. Directed and choreographed by Laila J. Franklin, this evening-length work taps into feelings of budding romance, when falling in love is silly and fast and sexy and devastating and you are brilliant and stupid and spellbound. Conceived as a meta-commentary on popular Contemporary dance aesthetics, obfuscated by post-modern and improvisatory movement practice, the piece sparks reflection about the human impulse for connection and versions of intimacy through the lens of love.

A man in his mid-thirties searches for meaning in the aftermath of a relationship.

Aspiring director Corky St. Clair and the marginally talented amateur cast of his hokey small-town musical production go overboard when they learn that Broadway theater agent Mort Guffman will be in attendance.

When Brad gets fired from his job, he goes to reopen an old cinema, he enlists his frends to help him show the last film the cinema aired before it closed... Only they don't know, the film is in Italian. With everyone sitting ready they begin to dub the movie... on the fly!

Chelsea Bledsoe and her husband Graig throw a surprise intervention for her old high school boyfriend, Henry, with a mismatched group of acquaintances from back in the day to fill out the guest list.

My dear friends, it's time for us to welcome you to another 'lost' Jane Austen novel. It's been improvised from start to finish by the amazing cast of Austentatious. The actors conjure up the story from nothing, backed by fully improvised lighting, soundtrack and, now I come to think about it, our camerawork too. This is the third time we have recorded Austentatious, this time as part of their residency at the Arts Theatre in London's glittering West End.

A couple, Vlad and Sophy, navigate their relationship as well as their own struggles with mental health in the context of a highly connected, politically uncertain modern world while on a trip to a remote Canadian island in this avant-garde feature film. PREFACE TO A HISTORY, created with a tiny crew of four people, represents an experiment in using minimalist tools to create an overwhelming aesthetic experience in service of a simple, but specifically contemporary, story about two people attempting to navigate a fraying relationship amid all the anxieties and external pressures of modern adulthood in a technologically-interconnected and politically unstable era.

After the indomitable and beloved founder of a scrappy theater camp in upstate New York falls into a coma, the eccentric staff must band together with her clueless "crypto-bro" son to keep the thespian paradise afloat.

In Netflix's first-ever crowd work special, Matt Rife gets up close and personal with an unpredictable Charlotte audience to riff on all things dreams.

La gran fiesta del cine

An indie film crew throw caution to the wind when they attempt to shoot a completely improvised drama where the film's big twist is being kept secret from their lead actress, while also navigating on-set mishaps, bizarre twists of fate, and the first year of a global pandemic.

A filmmaker and rapper duo revive Michel Gondry’s “Be Kind Rewind” protocols - a set of filmmaking “rules” with which groups of strangers can conceive, shoot, and screen a film in just two and a half hours. Against the grim backdrop of the stringent Shanghai lockdown, the event soon turns into a sanctuary for individuals to forge collective dreams.

En Frame

Two friends resort to playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, flipping a coin, and detailed, yet petty analyzation of their friendship to determine which of them will call the mother of their recently deceased best friend, informing her of his demise.

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.