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- "An Existential Epic Neo-Noir," loosely adapted from Charles Brockden Brown's 1799 novel Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, Overwhelm the Sky tells the story of Edgar "Eddie" Huntly, an east coast radio personality who moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in Golden Gate Park in what the police surmise was a simple mugging gone awry. As the sullen Eddie steps in as interim host of his old friend Dean's late-night talk-radio show, he obsessively makes regular visits to the forested spot where Neil's corpse was found. One such visit unleashes a chain of unpredictable events that sends Eddie snooping into the life of a sleepwalking drifter with a mysterious past.
- "Desert, culture, counterculture." 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. Highlights: University radical Mark Frechette flies his stolen aircraft right past the one piloted by Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett as they spin out of control. Daria Halprin ignores a hitchhiking Jonathan Winters. Milton Berle leaps right into a cascade of amorous sand-covered bodies. Spencer Tracy and Daria Halprin in a torrid extramarital affair. Beatnik surfer Dick Shawn phone-pranks capitalist pig Rod Taylor. It's all here.
- A husband-and-wife pair of retired cult deprogrammers experience marital strife when their past catches up with them.
- Ranch hand Tig Rizendez steals a white diesel pickup-truck from his ranch owner boss Tablo Schultz, hightailing it to San Francisco for a fateful meeting with a mysterious woman from his displaced family's past. It's not long before Tig's aging friend Danley Crocker is dispatched by Schultz to track him down in the city.
- In a working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood called Swissvale, filmmaker Daniel Kremer grew up on Woodstock Avenue, the same street where his mother's family had lived since the 1900's. In this essay documentary, Kremer returns from his current city San Francisco to revisit his old neighborhood, specifically the now abandoned, boarded-up house where he spent his childhood. Between unfortunately rare visits with his last remaining grandparent (now stricken with Alzheimer's), fond reminiscences of Woodstock Avenue as it once was, and a memorably hilarious dinner table debate about the sanctity of Heinz ketchup, Kremer meditates on how his childhood neighborhood crystallized his intense cinephilia, shaped his life's work, and how memories of lost places, in all their fragility, harden the shell of one's identity in ways we can never escape.
- The greatest expert on the life of the mysterious "Naomi" inadvertently teaches her audience the proper use of parentheses.
- Otto Preminger wasn't only one of the most famous directors of classic Hollywood. He was a presence, a brand, and the only one who rivaled Hitchcock as the greatest showman and self-promoter of his generation. But toward the end of his career, his attempts to "get with the times" (with films like Skidoo, Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon, Such Good Friends, Hurry Sundown, and others) shocked, alienated, and outright repelled audiences. What happened to Otto and how can one best appreciate and enjoy those confounding later works?
- Memory is a trip through a freaky funhouse. A young man visits an old fortune teller woman, who explains that his life has been a "crazy quilt fever dream." Her assertion spurs a real fever dream that digs deep back into his past and taps certain primal proclivities of his. A 16mm restoration.
- A once-beloved San Francisco jazz singer who has lost her singing voice sets out on a seemingly aimless road trip across the American West, following a nasty breakup with a married Polish orchestra conductor. After showing up unannounced at her ex-manager's hotel room at the Telluride Jazz Festival, she wanders from state to state looking to put many of the pieces of her life back together.
- A feature-length experimental "dramatic essay film," riffing on the work of both Marguerite Duras and Thom Andersen (in turns). A San Francisco resident, a happy transplant from the east coast, accounts his ongoing disconnection from Los Angeles throughout all his visits there. As a non-driver, he explores the feeling of displacement, bewilderment, and impotence that comes with pedestrian movements in the famously motor-dominated Los Angeles. An unexpected twist redefines these daunting and knowingly ugly (but often strangely beautiful) spaces.