A five-minute experimental film about the internal challenge of a Chinese toy painter as she is swept into a moment of artistic inspiration.
Social & External
The people behind it
Kim Jiang Dubaniewicz
Toy Painter
Extremely shy Lars finds it impossible to make friends or socialize. His brother and sister-in-law worry about him, so when he announces that he has a girlfriend he met on the Internet, they are overjoyed. But Lars' new lady is a life-size plastic woman. On the advice of a doctor, his family and the rest of the community go along with his delusion.
Iris is a shy and dowdy young woman stuck in a dead-end job at a match factory, who dreams of finding love at the local dancehall. Finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand and abandoned by the father, Iris finally decides the time has come to get even and she begins to plot her revenge.
Manakin is an experimental short that follows the story of a single woman living in a desolate house accompanied by a life-like stuffed doll. A creation of her own design, the manakin projects videos of single men reciting words of lust, absurd confessions and the desire for human connection. While these audio-visual projections keep her company in her isolation, our subject begins to weave her own web crafted by the same material as the doll, growing as an entity outside this house. Directed by Kasey Oldford, Manakin uses found audio prompts from the dating app Hinge, spliced and put back together to create a nerve wracking video love poem that touches on the obscene and lonely reality of the modern quest for love.
The inspiring true story of Richard Montañez, the Frito Lay janitor who channeled his Mexican American heritage and upbringing to turn the iconic Flamin' Hot Cheetos into a snack that disrupted the food industry and became a global pop culture phenomenon.
The Mysterious House of Dr. C. (1976) is a rarely seen, reworked version of the 1966 Dr. Coppelius, a dance film based on the classic 19th-century Leo Delibes ballet "Coppelia." This version contains poorly received songs, narration, and animation sequences not in the original.
A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.
At the turn of the century, Lodz, Poland, was a quick-paced manufacturing center for textiles, replete with cutthroat industrialists and unsafe working conditions. Three young friends, a Pole, a Jew, and a German, pool their money together to build a factory.
In Depression-era West Virginia, a serial-killing preacher hunts two young children who know the whereabouts of a stash of money.
A Finnish man goes to the city to find a job after the mine where he worked is closed and his father commits suicide.
Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness, struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.
This is the story of two male prostitutes who want to become professional actors and how they struggle to get into show business.
Charles Price may have grown up with his father in the family shoe business in Northampton, central England, but he never thought that he would take his father's place. Charles has a chance encounter with the flamboyant drag queen cabaret singer Lola and everything changes.
A socially awkward veterinary assistant with a lazy eye and obsession with perfection descends into depravity after developing a crush on a boy with perfect hands.
Because of the actions of her irresponsible parents, a young girl is left alone on a decrepit country estate and survives inside her fantastic imagination.
Leslie Zevo is a fun-loving inventor who must save his late father's toy factory from his evil uncle, Leland, a war-mongering general who rules the operation with an iron fist and builds weapons disguised as toys.
While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.
The film depicts the story of four people working in a sewing factory in Guro Industrial Complex in Seoul and the problems they face.
A wealthy, self-absorbed Rome socialite is racked by guilt over the death of her young son. As a way of dealing with her grief and finding meaning in her life, she decides to devote her time and money to the city’s poor and sick. Her newfound, single-minded activism leads to conflicts with her husband and questions about her sanity.
Live performance, Bayerische Staatsoper, 2011. The Tales of Hoffmann (French: LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN) is an opéra fantastique by Jacques Offenbach that combines three short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann into a haunting whole: a melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer. One of the questions this opera poses for any director is how to link the 'tales' of Hoffmann's three lost loves together and knit them satisfactorily into the Prologue and Epilogue. In this production, Richard Jones solves the puzzle by turning it into an autobiographical journey which ends with a grand meet-up of all the characters Hoffmann has encountered: for once, Hoffmann is not presented as a rollicking kind of drunken story-spinner, but rather a sad-eyed, sobered-up depressive, who reaches for the bottle only because his disastrous love life has gone wrong yet again.
Gilles' wife, Elise, who smiles when she thinks of him, cooks and scrubs and cheerfully makes love to him, suspects during her third pregnancy that he is having an affair with her coquettish younger sister, Victorine. Elise suffers, usually in silence. She listens to her husband rave; she asks her priest; she breaks picture frames; she weeps. She decides on a strategy to keep him. Will she succeed?
Suffering from a severe case of depression, toy company CEO Walter Black begins using a beaver hand puppet to help him open up to his family. With his father seemingly going insane, adolescent son Porter pushes for his parents to get a divorce.
A man is released from prison after 15 years. He reunites with his high school girlfriend, now a single mother of three. What follows is a lyrical take on love, regret and second chances.
In New York City, a young girl is caught in the middle of her parents' bitter custody battle.
The legendary Roberto Duran and his equally legendary trainer Ray Arcel change each other's lives.
Trevor, an insomniac lathe operator, experiences unusual occurrences at work and home. A strange man follows him everywhere, but no one else seems to notice him.
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.
A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
A daughter seeks to restore the reputation of her disgraced father, a wronged college professor. With help of a professional student, she must overcome an ambitious sorority bitch and corrupt college dean.
Young teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.
Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.
Rory is an ambitious entrepreneur who brings his American wife and kids to his native country, England, to explore new business opportunities. After abandoning the sanctuary of their safe American suburban surroundings, the family is plunged into the despair of an archaic '80s Britain and their unaffordable new life in an English manor house threatens to destroy the family.
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
A psychotherapist helps a law student cope with schizophrenia in one of five interconnected tales dealing with mental illness.
Young women toiling in a factory are exposed to hazardous material which takes a disastrous toll on their health.
A poetic and powerful story of a father forced to choose between love and duty.
While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime.
In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.
