Rob Nilsson

Amanda

A small boy is hurt by a horse on his father's ranch and he refuses to even be near one ever again. When a storyteller called Seven arrives with his huge imposing horse Amanda, everything changes.

The Defender of Sitting Ducks

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.

Good Men

After the birth of his grandson, Bobby Roth undertakes a cinematic investigation as to what constitutes being a "good man" in today's world. This voyage of discovery leads him to interview more than fifty of his friends, both men and women who he considers to be "good people," about their views on everything from how they were parented to their thoughts on feminism, change, and regrets they might have. Their answers both surprises and enlighten both the viewers and Bobby, himself.

It's a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point

Worlds collide in this unconventional essay film, when filmmaker, film historian, and archivist Daniel Kremer seamlessly edits Michelangelo Antonioni's legendary but controversial counterculture art film Zabriskie Point (1970) into the same narrative universe as Stanley Kramer's madcap epic comedy extravaganza It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). In creating these new sequences, Kremer comes to recognize that the exercise effortlessly draws cultural and historical parallels in twentieth-century American life that echo in present-day America. The editorial mashups weave a tangled web of social and cinematic history that root our notions of Americana in the mythology of the desert. As Kremer expounds in his narration on these often astonishing and sometimes shocking associations, his very personal ties to the subject matter become manifest.

Ezer Kenegdo

Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.

The Fourth Movement

Four interlocking stories with a Jazz theme. Four Women go out to visit the sites of the jazz clubs where Lou, 65 and dying of cancer, claims she once performed as a young singer. It's election night, Nov. 8, 2016 and the women follow the results on their cell phones. It's also opening night for the C Flat jazz club where they end the evening up as their worst fears are realized: Trump has won the election.

Sacred Blood

For Natia, firing bullets at her sister's head and narrowly missing is all in a days work. After taking over the family business, her sharp shooting act is the only thing keeping the declining Orbeliani Circus afloat. When a stranger and his dog drifts into her home town of Batumi, Georgia from the Black Sea, peddling his own act, Natia wonders if a change of fortune is finally on the horizon. As the circus's prospects begin to rise so do suspicions that the stranger is not who he seems. A fateful interaction forces changes upon Natia and she must leave her family to protect them from what she is becoming. Soon, she is traveling to a different city-by-the-bay, San Francisco, where confrontation and opportunity release a violent darkness rooting within her. Fighting against her loneliness and the rules of this new world, she is befriended by a troubled young artist with an innocent soul. Will this tenuous love lead her out of the darkness? Or, are they merely two halves of broken whole?

Sophisticated Acquaintance

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 European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.

Cine Manifest

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, John Hanson

Berkeley

Just as sex, drugs, rock & roll, hippies, and Vietnam enter our consciousness, so it does for Ben Sweet, the shy, 18-year-old son of conservative businessman, Sy. Ben enters UC Berkeley in 1966 to avoid the draft, but finds himself smack in the middle of a home-grown revolution.

The Inheritance

A beautiful orphan of mysterious parentage is asked by her adoptive family to help find a husband for their niece, but when two suitors both fall for the orphan girl, the niece instigates a scheme to discredit her in the eyes of her guardians. Based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott.

Tell Me No Secrets

Jess Koster is a young attorney in LA who is being stalked by the serial killer she is prosecuting.

Copycat

An agoraphobic psychologist and a female detective must work together to take down a serial killer who copies serial killers from the past.

Baja Oklahoma

Juanita Hutchins works at Texas bar, but she aspires to be a country songwriter. When she's not looking after her impulsive daughter, Candy, or vouching for her promiscuous friend, Doris Steadman, she's trying to maintain some semblance of a romantic life. As Juanita prepares to make the leap to Nashville, her former boyfriend, Slick Henderson, returns to town, further complicating her situation.

Heat and Sunlight

A man confronts jealously and rage as a love affair falters.