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Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.

Flamboyant Max Plugin is a jaded relic of the 1960s who has never really grown up. In his teens, Max ran away to northern California, where he met Teschlock, a charismatic ascetic and guru renowned among a small group of young followers. Teschlock asked Max to join him and his disciples on an ashram in India, Max declined and returned home to his family. Now, forty years later, at age 57, Max takes a journey to India to find Teschlock's unknown grave-site, and also himself. His adventures in India, and his Castaneda-esque experiences back home, form the heart of this very unusual road movie.

Fourteen year-old Ben Fries has a cult following, a 22-year-old girlfriend and mortal enemy named Rick Algarosa.

Following the publication of the first book about director Sidney J. Furie, this full-length documentary examines the life and career of the Toronto-born filmmaker. It is a journey that encompasses over 60 years, as we follow Furie's story from Canada to London and finally to Hollywood. In the midst of the 84-year-old Furie's biographical recounting, he directs two last personal projects, shot digitally on shoestring budgets, from the first solo scripts he has written since 1961. 'Drive Me to Vegas and Mars' is a comedy about aging and letting go, while 'Hannah Cohen' is a Holocaust-themed love story set and shot in Israel. The latter project is the culmination of a lifetime-long obsession with the Holocaust. Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel is an intimate portrait of a unique, prolific, and quietly influential filmmaker, a man with an impressive resumé who has stood behind the camera on great films such as The Ipcress File (1965), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), The Boys in Company C (1978), The Leather Boys (1964), The Entity (1982), The Appaloosa (1966), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), and many others.

Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra who has perfected his freakish steel-trap memory. As a result, however, his apartment has become an unlivable and unsanitary place. He goes out to find some cleaning supplies, only to find himself lost in a city he no longer knows. By shear happenstance, he bumps into an old friend, a world-class cut-up, who takes him to a place of importance to their past. There, Schweitzer realizes he must reconcile with the brother he has not spoken to and has refused to understand for most of his life.

Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.

Terminally bored recent widower Si Foster, an eccentric puzzle of a man (and self-proclaimed eggplant connoisseur) is terribly lonely. His daughter Sonya was kidnapped two years prior and, for reasons unknown to her, the ransom somehow wound up never being paid. As the Fourth of July approaches and Si finds that he has virtually no one with whom to celebrate the holiday, he finally gets up the nerve to contact the kidnappers through their intermediary. He agrees to pay the ransom with an inheritance he was left and is soon reunited with her...only to find that she has accepted her captors as her new family, and has grown to love them as such. Alas, the oddball Si is clueless and inept in interacting and trying to re-establish his relationship with her. But Sonya has a few tricks up her sleeve to get him to reveal why she was seemingly abandoned two years ago...with the help of some strange cargo she has brought back home with her!

Carla Durkow (Maya Baruch) is a filmmaker from Istanbul who screens her latest work, entitled Farewell Mighty Spirit, at a Philadelphia art gallery. Her film-within-a-film details the aftermath of the death of the Grand Poet of Santa Maria (William Cully Allen), and the reading of his will.

The second film in Daniel Kremer's Small Gauge Trilogy, three experimental narrative features for those with an open mind about what cinema can be. Surface Pressures is a loose adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novella that innovatively incorporates 8mm and 16mm found footage and uses these elements exclusively to tell the story, featuring music, narration, re-recorded dialogue, and meticulously constructed soundscapes.

Rick is plagued by headaches as the big game and an unexpected visit approach.

The greatest expert on the life of the mysterious "Naomi" inadvertently teaches her audience the proper use of parentheses.

Offers rare insight of the Arkestra and examines their current work (in the physical absence of Sun Ra) under the direction of Marshall Allen (now age 86).

This film explores a few days in the life of film students Jim and Laura and their nihilistic and restless group of friends. Deciding to adapt Macbeth and shoot it with a mostly homeless cast, Jim and his friends search for locations in abandoned buildings in Philadelphia. Here, their own story takes a very unexpected and cinematic turn.

The first film in Daniel Kremer's Small Gauge Trilogy, three experimental narrative features for those with an open mind about what cinema can be. Jerry, an ambulance-chasing lawyer (and 8mm film hobbyist), lapses into a deep depression after he is scammed out of his retirement savings. His intense love of W.C. Fields, of whom he does impersonations, and his commitment to both his mixed-up half-sister Karen (who is going deaf and learning sign language) is the only thing keeping him from suicide. Filmmaker Daniel Kremer's reflection on (and response to) Kieslowski's Camera Buff, a.k.a. Amator (1979).

David Cronenberg (the well-known Canadian director's American film-student counterpart) is making an ambitious "neorealist video" feature entitled "Wireless Internet"-and the ultimate toll it takes on his state of mind as the realities of the "wireless internet virus" morph into something well beyond the realm of fiction. Set to the music of A Silver Mt. Zion.

This is a short, autobiographical essay film about using art as an escape from the limitations of a speech impediment. Filmmaker Daniel Kremer explores and parallels how Spalding Gray, the renowned monologue performance artist, used his own creative life as an escape from his own depression. An analogy is made to how the filmmaker used cinema to escape the pain of his stuttering disorder.

This short film, a personal semi-autobiographical tribute to the early narrative work of filmmaker Louis Malle, tells the story of two brainy 18-year-olds, recent high-school graduates with fine future prospects, who get married and divorce one year later at age 19. Charles, a tweed-clad "old soul," must reconcile being a teenage divorcee as he attempts to forge a relationship with a new girlfriend, a young single mother. The film is set to the music of 30's French cabaret sensation Charles Trenet.

In the Womb of the Caudron is an essay-style film that takes you inside one of the most sacred, ancient and enduring religious rituals in the world. The karaha is a relatively obscure agricultural ritual performed in remote rural India by low-caste priests in concert with high-caste brahmins, dramatizing a shifting and sharing of powers. The ritual is a fusion of caste cultures, memorializing the identity-defining moment when the low caste Yadav family rejected the worship of high caste Indra, in favor of the low caste Krishna, the cow herding incarnation of Vishnu. The viewer is bombarded with a veritable lollapalooza of sights and sounds from the ritual itself -- a ritual that has been legally banned throughout India.

A young woman named Emily has just arrived in New York from Pittsburgh and has recently changed her name to Chazz. Jobless, she responds to an ad involving parrot-sitting for a Manhattanite going out of town, and must weather the emotional repercussions of the humiliating thing she decides to do while cooped up house-sitting, which precipitates in her eavesdropping on the neighbors, all the while having unreciprocated conversations with the parrot.

Animating Autism is a feature length documentary about seven kids on the autism spectrum collaborating to create their own short animated film. The documentary follows them as they learn how to turn their sketches into movies and form lasting friendships.