"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice,...
Marty and Speed are middle-aged San Francisco cabbies who hack to support their fading dream of making it as professional actors. Perpetually down on their luck, the friends find escape and camaraderie among their fellow drivers, playing cards and telling stories of backseat conquests, until one...
Ben Malafide has been in prison for 20 years. His nerves are shot, his feelings shriveled. St. Tre, who runs an escort service and a strip club has taken him in. Ben feels he has nothing to offer her. She feels kinship as a fellow outsider, and loves him as a twin, a lost soul. But St. Tre has a...
A young Jordanian woman from a small town outside Amman seeks greater personal and cultural freedom from a traditional family wants to attend a youth conference in Petra.
Center Divide is the second film in Rob Nilsson's multi-character Nomad Trilogy. In the first film, Arid Cut (2019), our refugees of the American Dream leave the city. In Center Divide, with no more West to escape to, they're now on the road heading East.
A small band of dysfunctional renegade homeless people led by charismatic "Pan" befriends a lonely youngster, a fatherless "Bobby" who stumbles upon their homeless encampment nestled by the railroad tracks. The busy socialite mother, Barbara instantly disapproves of "Bobby" & "Pan's" budding...
Phil Berkowitz, a 55 year old North Beach poet and survivor of the days of wine and roses, has a stroke. Helpless, he lies in his flea bag hotel room in San Francisco’s Tenderloin until he is found by Johnny, his next door neighbor.
A diverse group of people at a gala art gallery opening are confined to the gallery when tornadoes hit. Dramatic interactions are heightened by infidelity discovered, artistic vision corrupted, greed, and commercial banditry. Questions of what art is and how it is important to a community are...
Documentary - With David Schickele's dreamy, retro soundscape, CINE MANIFEST captures a resilient group of artists reminiscing about a time when people weren't afraid to fight for their ideals, while also creating a stirring tribute to American independent filmmaking. - Eugene Corr, Peter Gessner,...
Sky-high housing costs, rents no one can pay, urban development, and street crime make life difficult for RV dwellers in Berkeley, California. City bureaucrats collaborate with real estate agents to gentrify neighborhoods forcing out already marginalized people living in cars, trucks, and RVs. With...
Go Together chronicles the sinking fortunes of an Oakland art cinema. Michelle, co- owner with her husband Denny, wants to continue programming the high minded films she believes in while her husband flirts with the idea of a highly profitable “vintage porn” night promoted by St. Tre, owner of...
After his mom leaves him and his little brother, Aaron is forced to help his abusive step-father with his credit card scam. Set in the East Bay Area, California - this surreal coming of age story follows four young people clumsily learning how to interact with the world around them.
Estranged from his longtime girlfriend, suburban accountant Perry wanders into the Tenderloin at night and is drawn into a series of dangerous and erotic encounters.
Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life...
