Phil Burgers

Atropia

When an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility falls in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent, their unsimulated emotions threaten to derail the performance.

You’ve Never Been Completely Honest

Through animation and reenactment, You’ve Never Been Completely Honest brings to life Gene Church’s original, never-before-heard interview recounting the harrowing physical torture and brainwashing he endured at a secretive, four-day business seminar in California in 1970.

The Climb

Kyle and Mike are best friends who share a close bond — until Mike sleeps with Kyle’s fiancée. A stormy but enduring relationship ensues between Kyle, with limitless patience, and Mike, who only lives his life by sowing discord in that of others, across many years of laughter, heartbreak, and rage.

Our Time

A family lives in the Mexican countryside raising fighting bulls. Esther is in charge of running the ranch, while her husband Juan, a world-renowned poet, raises and selects the beasts. Although in an open marriage, their relationship begins to crumble when Esther falls in love with an American horsebreaker and Juan is unable to control his jealousy.

Spivak

A self-loathing, failed Eastside novelist living in the ‘hipster’ neighborhood of Echo Park in Los Angeles is shocked to find himself falling in love with everything he hates, including a simple All-American blonde girl from the Westside.

The Passage

A man escapes again and again as he’s pursued by pagan cultists in this sprawling episode of sublime and humanist surrealism produced as a pilot for Adult Swim.

Nina Conti: Clowning Around

This film follows Nina as she trains as a giggle doctor with Theodora Children's Charity, beginning with her trying to find her clown persona, who might be Scottish... or might not. Devastated by the discovery that Monkey can only perform in hospitals if he can be boil-washed, Nina tries to go it alone with only a red nose, a few misshapen balloon animals and some slightly disappointing magic tricks. Not to mention her professional snobbery rearing up as she finds herself turning into a baby-voiced children's entertainer. Then there are the difficulties she encounters when faced with clown phobia. Following her directorial debut with Her Master's Voice which won a Grierson Award and a BAFTA nomination, Nina Conti brings us another frank and intimate documentary about her eventful two-year stint as a hospital clown. Join her to discover whether Nina raised a laugh amongst sick children or whether she cried the tears of a clown.

Will Work For Laughs

Filmed during the 2012 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Will Work for Laughs hears from experienced comedians like Greg Behrendt, author of He's Just Not That Into You, emerging comedy stars, like Daniel Connell and Mick Neven and successful fringe performers like Dr Brown and Slow Clap on the demands of a comedy career as well as live performances showing the artists doing what they do best.