Gardeners of Eden

Stay the Same Never Change

Artist and director Laurel Nakadate takes us beyond the prepackaged and sanitized world of the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana to the true heartland of America and the tween-aged girls that inhabit it. In Kansas City, pop culture is something to be twisted and reshaped, relationships are either nonexistent or refabricated, and time is unstructured and teasing. At the heart of these girls' lives—and this innovative work of cinema—is a quest for understanding and a sense of place. The risks run and solutions posed engender both laughs and tears. The film's amateur actors and nonlinear narrative bring an unnerving, utterly human face to the challenges of young womanhood in a world that would prefer that girls watch the Disney Channel.

She's Dating the Gangster

Seventeen-year-old Athena Dizon unwittingly plays a trick on resident heartthrob and bad boy Kenji de los Reyes. All of a sudden, she finds herself pretending to be his girlfriend to make an ex jealous; however, she falls in love with him.

Committed

An accidental meeting between a man being pressured to propose to his girlfriend and a runaway bride.

Moore Street

The thoughts of a young African woman in Ireland as she considers her future, and her unfolding sense of identity, as she walks along the city street at night.

Stormé: Lady of the Jewel Box

“It ain’t easy…being green” is the favorite expression of Stormé DeLarverie, a woman whose life flouted prescriptions of gender and race. During the 1950s and '60s she toured the black theater circuit as a mistress of ceremonies and the sole male impersonator of the legendary Jewel Box Revue, America’s first integrated female impersonation show and forerunner of La Cage aux Folles.

The Dove on the Roof

Three people from very different walks of life meet at a large construction site. Young, unmarried, self-confident construction manager Linda Hinrichs dedicates herself completely to her work and enjoys living more independently then most women. Daniel, a student works on the construction site to make money during his summer holiday, and impresses Linda with his spontaneous energy and idealism. Brigadier Böwe, an older, divorced man works his way from one construction site to the other and has lost his own personal happiness on the path to developing what was seen as officially suitable social standards. Both men try to win Linda over, not realizing that they are taking her freedom away from her.

Kept

A young girl abducted by a serial sex criminal and is released unharmed, but decides not to inform the police. She must face the moral consequences when the assaults continue against other women.

On the Edge

A compendium of three short science-fiction films, each with a decidedly feminist slant.

Narcissus

Narcissus (from Greek Narkissos) shares the root nark-, with narcosis and narcotic. All these words have the same origin in the verb narkaō – to intoxicate through a strong smell. I was particularly interested to find out why a handsome and overall fortunate man says he never feels happy. He draws people in, but ends up hurting them, yet he is impossible to resist.

L’endemà

From the Cloud

In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship to moving images, both as viewers and producers. But even well before then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program that looks at found footage “films” in the Internet Age. The proliferation of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material. The artists in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on the cloud by doing so.

Soft Fiction

Chick Strand's SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2015.

Into Madness

Initially airing on HBO's "America Undercover" series, this riveting documentary focuses on three families shattered by the psychiatric disorder of schizophrenia. Subjects "Bob," "Missy" and "Steven" have lived for over a decade with schizophrenia. The film documents the difficult day-to-day existence of both those afflicted with this order and the families searching for answers to their loved ones' suffering. This film also shows the varied and variably successful treatment methods for each of the subjects—one is placed in a group home, one is placed in an institution, and one is cared for at home. The documentary was critically acclaimed for its compassionate treatment of mental illness.

Dance In The Desert

The author Jurga Ivanauskaitė (1961-2007) was considered a pioneer of contemporary Baltic literature well beyond the borders of Lithuania. Her work deals intensively with the tension between religion, sexuality and emancipation. Film documents and interviews serve to reconstruct the life of this independent and willful woman - from her childhood to her artistic breakthrough as a companion of the Lithuanian rock and punk scene, but also depicting her spiritual side, which brought her all the way to India, where she turned to Buddhism. She is shown as fighting for the Dalai Lama and a "free Tibet", shown as a literary mind, but first and foremost she is shown as a woman who stood bravely in the face of inconvenience, pain and inner demons.

Diary for My Father and My Mother

This story follows a young student, who is orphaned as she grows to adulthood in the shadow of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Coming from the Communist intelligentsia, she sees her friends and family react differently. Her lover, a married factory manager, supports the patriots and later assists fellow workers in staging a strike. Meanwhile her sister and others express anger at being forced from their homes during the revolution and continue to express a hatred for the rebels afterwards. But in the end they realize that for all people, real life is not possible after the revolt and its brutal suppression by the Soviets and their collaborators.

Gradiva: Esquisse I

The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire.

Velorama

Documentary looking at a century of cycling. Commissioned to mark the arrival of the 2014 Tour de France in Yorkshire, the film makes full use of stunning British Film Institute footage to transport the audience on a journey from the invention of the modern bike, through the rise of recreational cycling, to gruelling competitive races. Award-winning director Daisy Asquith artfully combines the richly-diverse archive with a hypnotic soundtrack from cult composer Bill Nelson in a joyful, absorbing watch for both cycling and archive fans.

Europa

Europa is a 12-minute anti-fascist film made in 1931 in Warsaw, Poland by surrealists Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. The film is based on Anatol Stern's 1925 futurist poem Europa. It uses collages and photograms, and articulates the sense of horror and moral decline its makers were witnessing. The film, while long thought to have been lost, is considered an avant-garde masterpiece.

The Enchanted Desna

Based on the novel of the same name by Oleksandr Dovzhenko. About the childhood of the famous Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was born on the ancient lands of Chernihiv, along the banks the Desna. The film consists of two parts. The first is the world shown through the impressions of the six-year-old Sashko. The second is the recollections and reasoning of Sashko, now an elderly colonel who liberates his native village during the war.

Marsella

A biological mother, Sara, and a foster mother, Virginia, share a girl. Sara lost custody due to problems with alcohol and drugs. Five years later, the girl is returned to her.