Maida Brankman

The Tuba Thieves

A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.

Pahokee

In a small agricultural town in the Florida Everglades, hopes for the future are concentrated on the youth. Four teens face heartbreak and celebrate in the rituals of an extraordinary senior year.

The Hottest August

Brett Story's visionary look at New York City as it braces for an uncertain future.

Skip Day

For seniors in Pahokee, a small, mainly African-American industrial town on Florida's Lake Okeechoboee, the Monday after prom is 'Skip Day.' Dozens of the students, miss their lessons, driving 60 miles to hang out and ponder their futures on the windy dunes of the Atlantic shoreline. The film intimately observes the shared joys of communal activity and extravagant display which bind these boisterous teenagers in their rites of passage towards an uncertain adulthood.

Roadside Attraction

After a very famous airplane arrives at Palm Beach International Airport, an otherwise ordinary stretch of Florida highway attracts an avid cluster of excited onlookers and selfie-takers. In the ensuing spectacle, these curious Americans reveal the qualities they may share with the plane’s huuuge-ly notable passenger.