2004 Official Sidewalk Selections

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE is a futuristic drama about five survivors trying to make sense of a New World after a devastating urban catastrophe challenges their basic human needs. Set in a bleak, post-urban landscape in the aftermath of the Third World War, the film presents a strangely limited environment where a single woman and four men are forced to communicate without words as a result of destructive gasses from the war. When their pasts are erased by the war, they are forced to recreate their lives both individually and collectively.

A contemporary remake of Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", Alice finds herself bored and fed up with the world around her. When she is offered the chance to know all the answers to all her life's questions, she takes it, and falls deep into the demented world of Wonderland.

A family of Iraqi-Israelis, each with his or her own weaknesses and determination, gathers for an Independence Day picnic. Their background stories are presented, reaching back as little as a few days or as far back as the War of Independence and the old country before that, and interlocking in ways that even they never realize.

Four young men rob a mysterious foreigner's apartment. Everything goes as planned until his "relatives" show up.

Adapted from James Joyce's Ulysses, Bloom is the enthralling story of June 16th, 1904 and a gateway into the consiousness of its three main characters: Stephen Dedalus, Molly Bloom and the extraordinary Leopold Bloom.

Kristoffer is a billboard hanger, 24 years old and carefree. When his girlfriend Elisabeth dumps him for the boss of her trend bureau, his life falls into pieces. He feels like a loser. By coincidence some of Kristoffer's video diaries end up with the producer of the popular talk show "Karsten Tonight" in TV2. A few weeks later Kristoffer's life has become TV entertainment. People love the sequences from his commune at Tøyen: Kristoffer's half-twisted view of his surroundings, his crazy best friend Geir, not to mention the weird web designer Stig Inge, who hasn't set foot outside the Tøyen shopping center for two years. Kristoffer's future again looks bright, everyone likes him, but revealing your life on national television comes with a price tag. As Kristoffer's future in the TV business looks brighter and brighter, his friends start suffering. Geir's big secret is revealed, and Stig Inge's personal problems are much more serious than Kristoffer first thought. It will cost him a great deal to win his friends back. Kristoffer knows what he wants, but does he have enough guts to follow his heart?

In a small town of rolling fields and endless skies, isolated 16 year old Mason lives in a world where families exist in fragmented silence and love seems to have gone missing. Then Mason meets Danny, a sensitive and troubled girl, and their tender bond is soon tested after a fatal accident and a series of complications takes Mason away for something he didn't do. Upon his return, the two find what they're looking for - but with tragic consequences.

Plaid-skirted schoolgirls are groomed by a secret government agency to become the newest members of the elite national-defense group, D.E.B.S.

A night at a local bed and breakfast turns into a bloody supernatural fight to the death.

A documentary on the once-promising American rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, and the friendship/rivalry between their respective founders, Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor.

DOUBLE DARE is a double-barreled, action-packed documentary about the struggles of two stuntwomen in male-dominated Tinseltown to stay working, stay thin, and stay sane.

From emerging storyteller, Aaron Greer, comes a thought-provoking story about a family's struggle to raise a child in the inner city, where some get lost and some get grown. Twelve year-old Eric lives with his mother Rolanda and father Darryl in a working class neighborhood. Darryl drives a city bus second shift. Rolanda, who is very pregnant and not feeling well, takes care of her ailing mother who lives with them. The story begins when Rolanda discovers that she has forgotten to fill the prescription for her mother's new diabetes medicine. Someone must make the long walk through the neighborhood to the pharmacy that evening, and the only one who can is Eric. With his granny's prescription, insurance card and $22 stuffed in his sock, Eriic starts out on what appears to be a simple errand. Along the way things become unexpectedly complicated, as he finds himself contending with the thoughtless demands that adults make of children and with his friends' risky behaviors. As night falls, we watch Eric struggle to complete his responsibility by taking actions that seem logical to a good kid on the threshold of adulthood, but which will in fact bring him to the brink of danger. Meanwhile his mother waits, worries and questions her decision to send young Eric alone through the darkening streets.

Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth's excitement about the Queen of England visiting her New Zealand town grows when she might meet her. As the town prepares, Elizabeth is drawn to the outcast elderly woman Hira.

Documentary on the civil rights activist, Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered in 1965 as she campaigned for black suffrage in Selma, Alabama, and its effect on her family.

In 1978 Oakley Hall lll was a promising playwright on the verge of national recognition when a mysterious fall from a bridge took his artistic life away. He suffered horrific head injuries, was hospitalized nearly a year and incapicitated much longer. The Loss of Nameless Things is the haunting tale of Hall's fall from grace and what happens when, twenty five years later, a theater company stages the very play he was writing the night he fell.

Memrom was the greatest company on earth. Now their top executives rule the prison yard golf course. And their laid-off employess struggle with the absurdities of starting over from nothing. Not even the air you breathe is free in this improvisational romp through the ruins of corporate fraud.

Monster Road explores the wildly fantastic worlds of legendary underground clay animator Bruce Bickford. Tracing the origins of his remarkably unique sensibility, the film journeys back to Bickford's childhood in a competitive household during the paranoia of the Cold War and examines his relationship with his father, George, who is facing the onset of Alzheimer's Disease. Bickford's films, especially the dark and magical clay animations he created for Frank Zappa in the 1970s, have achieved cult status worldwide. Entirely self-taught, the 56-year-old Bickford works alone in a makeshift basement studio in his house near Seattle. Bickford's father George, a retired Boeing engineer of the Cold War era, is the other main character. George's talent for maximizing the space inside airplanes and missiles parallels his son's animations, which often contain dozens of inch-tall figures fighting battles on a tiny set. George's wondrous musings about the universe reveal a deep admiration for the implicit architect of such splendor while atheism prevents him from admitting the possibility of a God. Along with the wonder of creation, George considers the pain of a life spent disengaged from his family and centered on the imperfections in those around him.

A little girl is told by her parents that she is adopted. Determined to find her real mother, she begs to be taken to Sri Lanka, where her mother works with a militant group of activists.

An unbalanced young girl in upstate New York dairy country falls for a petty criminal from NYC and tries to manipulate him into being her boyfriend.

This award-winning film airs nationally on PBS. It documents the lives of a group of African-American women from Alabama's Black Belt region, who see their lives radically changed as their artwork is suddenly recognized and embraced by the elite American museum world.

Rick, an NYC ad exec, disrespects a woman at a job interview. Rick and his boss bump into her later that evening, when she's their waitress. Rick gets her fired. It's payback time. He's cursed.

An elderly amateur artist competes with famous professionals to get her work accepted by the Royal Academy of Art.

The discovery of a corpse threatens to unravel a bumbling local politician's campaign for governor of Colorado.