Last week, the Slamdance Film Festival announced the narrative and documentary features that will be screening during the 20th edition running from January 17 through 23. Today, the festival’s unveiled the lineups for its Special Screenings, Beyond and Shorts programs. With descriptions from the festival…
SPECIAL SCREENINGS PROGRAM
Joe Manganiello’s La Bare. An insider’s look at the history, the lives and the culture of the greatest male strip club in the world, La Bare Dallas.
Thomas Morgan, Francois Caillaud, and Dan Chen’s Waiting for Mamu. Pushpa Basnet has dedicated her life to ensuring no child spends life in prison.
Bill Plympton’s Cheatin’. A newlywed wife proves the depth of her love by becoming her cheating husband’s mistresses.
Lise Raven’s Kinderwald. Two little boys vanish into the mountains in 1854, and their return becomes a mysterious and brutal test of their mother’s faith.
Cheatin’ Trailer from Bill Plympton.
SHORTS
Peter Baxter, Ben Hethcoat, and Eric Ekman’s DIY, which explores the development of the do-it-yourself indie film movement with filmmakers who have shaped it. Filmmakers include Benh Zeitlin, Chris Nolan, Rian Johnson, Marc Forster, Nina Menkes and Oren Peli.
Marjorie Cohen’s La Mime. Two mimes make a connection through a battle that bends reality.
David Greenspan’s Somewhere in the Valley. A man has sex with his neighbor’s wife 72 times, but it’s okay because his neighbor paid him to do it.
Paul Rachman’s Zoe Rising. A haunting, poetic look back at the childhood of the late New York screenwriter and actress Zoe Tamerlis Lund, through the fading memories of her surviving mother, sculptor Barbara Lekberg.
BEYOND PROGRAM
Monja Art and Caroline Bobek’s Forever Not Alone. An astonishingly up-close and intimate look at the deep bonds of friendship amongst a group of adolescent girls, as one of them prepares to move away.
David Beilinson, Suki Hawley, and Michael Galinsky’s Who Took Johnny. On September 5, 1982, Johnny Gosch, 12, disappeared while preparing to deliver newspapers in West Des Moines, Iowa. For the next 30 years his mother Noreen devoted her life to finding out what happened.
Pat Kiely’s Three Night Stand. Carl’s plan to reconnect with Sue is compromised when he discovers that his former girlfriend is running the ski lodge where they’re vacationing.
Jakob Lass’s Love Steaks. A shy massage therapist and a rebellious kitchen worker at a luxury hotel develop a bond that turns into a complicated, bittersweet anti-romance.
Jerzy Rose’s Crimes Against Humanity. A sweet and trusting young woman is repeatedly injured in bizarre accidents, but her overconfident boyfriend is far from sympathetic—he’s busy playing power games at the university where he works.
NARRATIVE SHORTS PROGRAM
Xacio Baño’s Anacos. An old woman’s life is examined and reassembled by her son, who looks back on the many different stages she has passed through.
Raisa Bonnet’s Old Moon. A visit from her son-in-law and granddaughter causes Elsa, living deep in the mountains, to make a silent and dramatic decision.
Bruce Bundy, Nigel DeFriez, Rob Malone, Kira Pearson, Alex Mechanik, Jessie Levandov, and Jonathan Rosenblit’s The Greggs. The esoteric and secluded group responsible for the creation of the world’s standardized tests must find a way to adapt when their way of life is threatened by dissent within their ranks.
Jesse Burks’s One Please. The perfect suburb has a rather gory method of currency when it comes to children’s treats.
Marco Coppola’s Grand Morelos. An old street musician’s depression is shaken when an unexpected friend inspires him to examine what he wants most out of life.
Louis D’Arpa’s Eidos. A blind sculptor attempts to capture his aging mother’s essence in an art piece.
Markus Englmair’s Milk and Blood. Father and son respond violently to each other and their own frustrations with the scope of their lives as dairy farmers.
Carlos Violadé Guerrero’s Not Funny. When a woman turns the tables on her prankster husband, they are both forced to live with the serious consequences of a practical joke.
Catrin Hedström’s Pink & Baby Blue. A transgendered woman decides between using the men’s restroom or the ladies’ restroom.
Marc Horowitz’s Moving. A series of peripheral conversations between two workers on the job raises more questions than answers.
Adan Jodorowsky’s The Voice Thief. When an opera singer loses her voice, her husband embarks on an odyssey through Miami’s dark underworld to recover it through supernatural means.
Jessie Kahnweiler’s Meet My Rapist. After accidentally bumping into him at the farmers’ market, Jessie is forced to confront the effect her rapist has had on her life.
Aneil Karia’s Beat. A man finds his withdrawal from the chaos and loneliness of the city challenged by a visceral inner force.
Nick King’s Marla. After encountering a man curious about her rare medical condition, a woman risks exploring new aspects of her sexuality.
Boudewijn Koole’s Off Ground. A slender woman of 50 and a 12-year-old boy act as a single unit with one flowing movement, until suddenly they let go of each other.
Martin Krejci’s Little Secret. When his little white lie has unexpected large-scale consequences, an injured boy struggles to reach an understanding with his mother about how he was hurt.
Max Ksjonda’s The Way. A neglected teenager makes a bet with his friends that leads him on a dangerous trip to another city.
Ian Lagarde’s Daybreak. Growing tension in a group of friends leads to quiet violence and destruction as the children enter adolescence.
Jessica Barclay Lawton’s We Keep On Dancing. Alan, a sensitive sculptor and grieving widower, connects with an aggressive mechanic in a rather unusual way.
Guillermo Lecuona’s Mother Corn. A Triqui Indian teen wrestles spiritual visions that awaken appreciation for her grandmother and culture.
Francis Lee’s Bradford-Halifax-London. An irate father and pregnant mother argue vigorously after catching the 10:22 train from Bradford to London, with their sullen teenage daughter and the entire train car as audience.
Morrisa Maltz’s Odyssea. A young woman returns to her idyllic hometown and undertakes a private venture that involves both real and imagined inhabitants from her past.
Lindsey Martin’s Love Letter. A little girl attempts to make sense out of her parents’ divorce, with only scraps of their life together and her imagination to help her.
Nedra McClyde and Jamund Washington’s First Baptist. A young Southern Baptist choir soloist fights for the right for his place in both the choir and in his community.
Joshua Moore’s Keep a Tidy Soul. A young woman abruptly loses her soul and does everything she can think of to find it again.
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s Kuhani. A conflicted African priest wrestles with his conscience.
Mihaela Popescu’s The Walk. An old solitary woman feels the urge to go outside and feel alive again.
Leah Shore’s I Love You So Much. A man and woman express their affection for each other in increasingly bizarre and animated ways.
Rujiroj Thanasankittiwat’s Pui. A mother’s attempt to discourage her daughter from acting like the neighborhood boys is successful, but only on the surface.
Ethan Young’s Trauma. Proving that there’s nothing menacing in the attic of her childhood home is the only thing standing between Isabelle and freedom, but even with her doctor’s insistence, something still seems amiss.
DOCUMENTARY SHORTS PROGRAM
Ash Brandon’s Punches & Pedicures. An ex-Vietnamese gangster escapes to Defiance, Ohio where he now runs his own nail salon by day and trains at-risk youth in the brutal sport of Mixed Martial Arts by night.
J. Christian Jensen’s White Earth. Three kids and an immigrant mother offer a glimpse into their lives in this poetic and poignant portrait of North Dakota’s oil boom.
Simon Mercer’s Glass Eyes of Locust Bayou. Bayou-based filmmaker Phil Chambliss makes movies which blur the line between good and evil in rural Arkansas.
Ben Mullinkosson and Bobby Moser’s What I Hate About Myself. A local Chinese TV station pairs with a cosmetic surgery sponsor for a contest in which the winner receives free surgery in the hope of looking more “Western.”
Fraser Munden and Neil Rathbone’s The Chaperone 3D. The story of a lone teacher who is chaperoning a middle school dance in 1970s Montreal when it is invaded by a menacing motorcycle gang.
Matthew Salleh’s Pablo’s Villa. 23 years after the picturesque holiday town Villa Epecuen was submerged in front of Pablo’s eyes, the modern-day Atlantis re-emerges from the sea, preserving both his memories and his home.
Meg Smaker’s Methel Island. A meditation on the ravaging effects of meth in a small island community in the Sacramento Delta.
Ryan Vance’s Jim Morris: Lifelong Fitness. A former Mr. America and Mr. USA, amongst other impressive titles, Jim Morris is a 77-year-old vegan bodybuilder who continues to work today as a personal trainer in Venice, California.
ANIMATION SHORTS PROGRAM
Sean Buckelew’s Another. A dreamlike narrative in which an intruding bear kills a family man and attempts to assume his role; mother and son try to adapt to the uneasy situation, but the threat of violence lingers.
Lori Damiano’s Lord I: The Records Keeper. A colorful and mystical odyssey, dense and playfully-drawn: a woman weighed down by books and surrounded by her own mental projections attempts to find peace in the present moment.
Vita Weichen Hsu’s A Tongue Silent Like Your Words. Two bodies grasp and entwine in an elegant and bizarre animated pencil drawing, intercut with evocative imagery of combat and escape.
Kim Ju-im’s The Path of Wind. A human office chair unravels its legs and goes on a wildly imaginative psychedelic vision quest filled with both terror and beauty, leading to a transformation into a musical instrument of liberation.
Michael Langan’s Butler, Woman, Man. A French château becomes a magical place of gliding servants and shifting physical spaces, creating a fascinating sense of displacement as a man becomes a butler, becomes a woman, becomes a man.
Yu Yu’s U U. A humorous story of a man gazing into a mirror and discovering all of the pairs on his body; the thought that he could be not one, but two people takes him on a journey through the world of flesh and back to his origins.
Steven Vander Meer’s Salmon Deadly Sins. Dreamy, gorgeously morphing fish imagery inspired by the seven deadly sins merges with floating anagrams, the entire piece hand-drawn on a series of 3×5 index cards.
Alberto Vazquez’s Unicorn Blood. Two squabbling teddy bears who must kill to maintain their cuteness hunt in a hallucinatory wilderness for their favorite prey.
EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS PROGRAM
Ashley Christopher Leach’s Those People of the South. A three-part examination and deconstruction of the filmmaker’s eccentric and troubling family utilizing a variety of home recordings.
Lucas Leyva’s The Coral Reef Are Dreaming Again. Two corals living in the underwater remains of Miami share their dreams of the city’s former inhabitants.
Drew Lint’s Rough Trade. An impressionist and assaultive character transformation of a young street hustler into a branded member of a leather cult.
Evan Mann’s Real Etheral. An otherworldly journey through a fantastical metaphysical realm saturated with mystery and transition.
Alejandro Peña’s R/B/G. An assaultive freakout of planetary catastrophe embedded into television signals.
Gazelle Samizay’s Ravel. A woman traverses a multi-planar desert landscape in search of psychological release.
Naoko Tasaka’s Flower. A quiet audio narrative about a hungry bear hypnotically collides with bold and evocative natural and geometric imagery.
Masahiro Tsutani’s Between Regularity and Irregularity. An overwhelming experience of pleasure forms when the timing of improvised sounds deviates slightly from the timing one expects.
Caleb Wood’s Bird Shit. A study of birds through an arrangement of photos of bird shit.
ANARCHY SHORTS PROGRAM
Steve Girard’s Wawd Ahp. The filmmaker’s rap manifesto and a collection of animated sea creatures come to a grisly head.
Rachel Ruizhen Ho’s Welcome. A beautiful boy emerges to find himself awash in a scene that may or may not be welcoming.
Jess Iglehart’s White Hot Grid. A false article of 1980s futurism, rattled apart by multiple generations of dubbing.
Akiz Ikon’s Der Nachtmahr. An indulgent teenage girl discovers her self through the disgusting creature that visits her at night.
Julian Yuri Rodriguez’s C#ckfight. A deconstructed adaptation of “Dante’s Inferno,” taking place at a bathsalt-fueled fighting ring in Miami’s underworld.
Joe Tippett and Robert Brice’s After Arcadia. A lone scientist wracked with guilt over his part in the accidental extermination of humanity is hoping to rewrite history and erase his past mistakes.
Mihai Wilson’s OVO. Stranded, starving and facing certain death, three intergalactic criminals encounter an ominous harbinger that will change the fate of the universe.
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