Popular music, Elvis and Jimi Hendrix, serves as the MacGuffin for meditations on family, race and obsession in this thrillingly peculiar debut film. Juggling multiple formats and innovative editing, director Kevin Aduaka ably handles the two complimentary stories while establishing himself as a fresh, innovative force in cinema.  More...

In her gorgeous and love-affirming feature debut – which was the sleeper hit of this year's Cannes Film Festival – Nadine Labaki finds gold in the hot goo used to strip body hair. Set in and around a Beirut beauty salon, CARAMEL stirs together the stories of five women’s lives.  More...

Santi Amodeo follows his critically acclaimed debut, ASTRONAUTS, with the similarly, winsomely idiosyncratic DOGHEAD. The film traces a few strange, lost days in the life of a teenager (Juan José Ballesta) with a nervous condition who is trying to find his way home. Amodeo is able to see the mundane through the off-center vision of his protagonists, and the result is a visually striking, deceptively subtle tale that revels in its unconventionality.  More...

The remarkable debut of Korean-American Lee Isaac Chung, made in collaboration with Rwandan youths at a local relief base where Chung worked and lived, is crafted with dramatic precision and deep humanity. One teenager's journey home to his rural village becomes a plea for reconciliation delivered by a poet he meets along the way, embodied by Rwanda's famous poet, Edouard B. Uwaya.  More...

A movng musical portrait of PDA.  More...

Originally released in 1975, THE PASSENGER is, on the simplest level, a suspense story about a man trying to escape his own life. This haunting film is a portrait of a drained journalist, played by Jack Nicholson, whose deliverance is an identity exchange with a dead man. The film was shot on location and takes Nicholson on an incredible journey through Africa, Spain, Germany and England.  More...

In attendance:  Jeb Brody, Ramin Bahrani, Lisa Muskat

Small in stature but huge in ambition, 12-year-old Dominican orphan Alejandro works every angle in his struggle to support himself and his flighty older sister. Director Ramin Bahrani's camera finds the beauty in the harsh world of the “Iron Triangle,” a cluster of auto body shops in the shadows of Shea Stadium that his hero calls home. Young actor Alejandro Polanco shines in the lead role, mixing true charisma with a hard-edged moxie that seems transported from an earlier time.  More...