Hiding in the Open examines one night in the life of two capricious twenty-somethings searching for direction. Good natured but rebellious Chase, fleeing domesticity, joins his lesbian party-girl companion Denny on a tour through Los Angeles nightlife. Abandoned by her fiance and desperate to escape the solitude of her apartment, recovering alcoholic Hazel embarks on a parallel journey of self-discovery punctuated by the beckoning of a whiskey bottle. It's an emotional experience, finding poetry in it's images and truth in the spaces we try to ignore.
20 short films about human rights.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, two teenagers attempt to create a feature length documentary about their lives. The main character James (played by himself) becomes obsessed with the project and is pushed into a more introverted, lonely existence. His best friend Quinn (played by himself) sets out to help him, but is met with the real answer as to why James is keeping himself inside: the rejection of what he thinks is the love of his life. The two of them go their separate ways, with James going deeper into a depression he’s not sure he can escape from.
Alliances are tested when seven college pals reunite to watch two of their own say “I do” at a seaside wedding. But the maid of honor and the groom share a passionate history, and the bride isn’t the only one who’s wondering if it’s all in the past.
A businessman, Tsuda, runs into a childhood friend, Kojima, on the subway. Kojima is working as a semiprofessional boxer. Tsuda soon begins to suspect that Kojima might be having an affair with his fiancée Hizuru. After an altercation, Tsuda begins training rigorously himself, leading to an extremely bloody, violent confrontation.
In order to win the Street Dance Championships, a dance crew is forced to work with ballet dancers from the Royal Dance School in exchange for rehearsal space.
Anthony ‘Blest’ (Mark Webber) is one of the most talented and notorious graffiti artists in New York City. Despite the tragic loss of his older brother during a nightly 'bombing' foray with a graffiti crew, Anthony has the same insatiable addiction. With the other members of his ‘crew,’ Anthony parties, shoplifts spray-paint and 'tags' virgin walls with his signature 'Blest.' He does his best to avoid run-ins with the cops and hostile rival crews, but he can’t avoid the pressure from his mother to attend college, and from his girlfriend to leave New York with her. As tensions rise, a physical threat from the cops causes the crew to intensify their bombing excursions, calling an all out war on the city. When the inevitable confrontation happens, a tragedy results that pushes Anthony to make a decision that has even darker consequences.
A gay man in Soho looking for a new roommate tries to come to terms with a new reality after 9/11.
A vast public works project in West Africa. Horn, the construction site manager, and Cal, a young engineer, share lodging behind the double gates of their compound. Leone, Horn’s recent bride, comes to join them the same night that a man appears at the fence. His name is Alboury. Like a specter in the darkness, he demands the body of his brother who died earlier that day on the site. He will hound the two men all night long until they return it, as Leone watches the disaster play out before her.
Ana is Manuela's teacher. Together, they will discover if romance exists or is only an invention.
An improvised drama following two couples as they spend the weekend away together, only to be confronted with the problems in their relationships.
Stine Olson is reunited with his childhood friend Jan and his brother Paul. Both want to sell a property inherited from their father and hire Stine to organize the demolition of the house.
In metahistorical New York city electrotechnician Lafayette deals with a megalomaniac director of a wax museum of ancient Rome, an italian lonely anarchist, a group of feminist actresses - including Angelica who falls in love with him - and a small adopted chimpanzee.
Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.
Set in sultry 1950s Mississippi, two teenagers grapple with surging hormones and the enticing promise of love, unknowing of the tragedy that looms ahead.
Newly divorced, Achilles Pumpkinseed lives alone in the house left to him by his deceased mother. Depressed and adrift, he spends his days smoking pot and watching television, usually alone but sometimes with his equally rootless friend Patroclus. One day an unexpected visitor named Homer shows up at Achilles' doorstep, bearing an unusual gift: an old dilapidated camping trailer painted like a child's image of a watermelon. Achilles' life will never be the same. Until it is. Sort of.
A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.
When a salon refuses to hire her because of her plump figure, irrepressible hair stylist Kathi plots revenge by opening her own beauty parlor next door. But when she faces a cash-flow problem, Kathi resorts to some creative means of raising capital.
Single mom Dottie Ingels sells cosmetics in a department store, but she dreams of being a comedian. When she inherits some money, she takes the chance and moves with her two children Erica and Opel to New York to perform in small bars. Soon her agent Arnold Moss makes her famous, but while she travels all over USA, her children stay home lonely.
At her husband's funeral, Pearl, Jewish mother of two divorced and antagonistic daughters, meets an old Italian friend of her husband, whose advice years previously had stopped the husband leaving home. For 23 years he, now a widower, has secretly loved Pearl.