It's 1999 and the Middleview Ducks high school basketball team are about to play the most low-stakes game of their lives. As the team prepares for another certain loss, the dramas around the game become more of a focus than the score. Pot-smoking, existentialism, radical theatre kid protests, and a dog on the loose, all unfold before, during, and after the high school basketball game.
In this Program
- The Drink
- Cosima Spender12mGBEnglish Narrative Short
- Cells
- Raymond Wood12mEnglish Narrative Short
- Sven
- Christopher Rucinski11mEnglish Narrative Short
- The Great Record Hunt
- Ethan Minsker, Shayne Kamat25mEnglish Documentary Short
- Dough
- Kurt Schneider9mEnglish Narrative Short
- THE WIND PHONE
- Kristen Gerweck16mJapanese (English Subtitles)Narrative Short
- Too Late
- Clayton Dean Smith4mEnglish Narrative Short
- Fuck you, Steve
- 9mEnglish Narrative Short
*Comedy*
A tough lady trucker trains her wimpy best friend to compete in the National Ladies Arm Wrestling Championship.
Faced with a split custody break up, a family's older daughter kidnaps her hostile younger sister to embark on a journey to reconnect before they part.
In this biting satire, an aspiring teenage comedian joins a theatre group and is cast to play a school shooter. Will this "funny man" be able to pull off such a heavy role? A film that satirizes the way buzz culture feeds national tragedies and reckons with the way social media shapes our engagement of violence and comedy.
A Mother struggling with mental illness and financial strain mentions her plan to impulsively move across the country, again. Her Son learns with each question that he, alone, has literally one-shot to save his mother from a potentially deadly setback. We witness the true story of two complex minds fighting to find love, and their loved one, in the darkness.
Socially out of touch Eddie is obsessed with old school pinball. When he's not fantasizing about 1970s pinball champs he's working as a repair man. After discovering a mysterious old pinball table, Eddie starts a quest to repair it and learn of the game's origins. As his focus deepens and his desire to fix the machine turns into paranoid obsession, he seeks out help to uncover the game's secrets. Is this the greatest game ever made?
Three women at different stages of life - Suzy Hotrod, Evilicious, and Captain Smack Sparrow - struggle to balance their lives in New York City with the dedication and stamina needed to maintain their place on the world's best roller derby team.
*Suspense/Drama*
A woman returns to her estranged family, and reconnects with a former lover. When the robbery they plan goes awry, she must choose between abandoning her family again or taking responsibility for the chaos she's created.
Wayne, a struggling method actor, inherits the city's last porno cinema from his estranged father, Al. Seeing this as an unconventional opportunity to reconcile their relationship, Wayne absorbs himself in the underworld of the pornography business. While running the cinema Wayne meets a cast of characters. Each character acts as a piece of a puzzle in helping Wayne rediscover the father he barely knew. But the old cinema turns out to be much more than Wayne anticipated.
Will, the estranged son of a conman, was left holding the bag, literally. His shady Russian neighbor, Roman, asked him to hold a million-dollar stamp collection, then swiftly disappears. Driven by fear and the desire to "do the right thing," Will goes on the hunt for Roman with the intention of returning the valuable goods. But when a significant piece of the collection goes missing, the filmmakers are forced to reexamine Will's capacity for honesty.
A deep dig into the crates of the vinyl record resurgence to discover what an old technology says about our relationship to music and each other in a divided time in America.
Vinyl Nation & Panel Discussion
Following the screening of Vinyl Nation listen to the conversation as director & producer Kevin Smokler joins Jay Glysz of Lightning Licks Vinyl Preservation Society, Jim Gleason of Radio Wasteland (Midland), and Jordan Pries of Electric Kitsch (Bay City) in a panel discussion guided by Peter Rose-Barry, festival programmer.