Laurie Simmons

After graduating from film school, Aura returns to New York to live with her photographer mother, Siri, and her sister, Nadine, who has just finished high school. Aura is directionless and wonders where to go next in her career and her life. She takes a job in a restaurant and tries unsuccessfully to develop relationships with men, including Keith, a chef where she works, and cult Internet star Jed.

A 65-year-old single artist living in New York City has a good life: a stable teaching job, successful friends, and a loyal, aging dog named Bing. As her dream of a respectable place in the art world becomes more elusive, her frustration with her lack of recognition feels alarmingly urgent.

Lena Dunham directed short.

College student Ella is completely focused on her ambiguously romantic relationship with her dorm-mate, Chris. She is so consumed by trying to understand his behavior that she's neglecting the screenplay she is supposed to write in order to graduate. When she does sit down to work on the script, her increasingly awkward social life bleeds onto the page and her work begins to express her true feelings about her own situation.

Simmons, best-known for her photographs of miniature rooms populated by dolls and of oversized objects—such as a house, birthday cake, and pistol—balanced on female legs, both human and fake, brings these characters to life in a three-act mini-musical. The film is inspired by three distinct periods of Simmons’s photographic work: vintage hand puppets, ventriloquist dummies and walking objects enact tales of ambition, disappointment, love, loss, and regret. Working with composer Michael Rohaytn ("Personal Velocity") and cameraman Ed Lachman ("The Virgin Suicides" and "Far From Heaven"), Simmons’s puppets come to life in miniature domestic scenes that echo real life.

Practically a home movie, Lena (Dunham) asks her parents to say specific lines for a film she's shooting while they request to be let in her apartment.