Daniel Kremer

During one fateful summer, Richie is forced to deal with his mom's deportation and prepare for his First Holy Communion as a Catholic while living with a caring adoptive family whose young son becomes Richie's closest friend and support.

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.

"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice, Luz and Ken are star-crossed lovers in screenwriter Sal's script, until their desire takes shape, inscribing itself into a movie of their own design. Risking his sanity to save the screenplay, Sal struggles to regain control of his characters and satisfy the demands of his producer Lester (legendary Velvet Underground founder John Cale), driving a wedge between the lovers with a desperate attempt to seduce Luz.

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.

An imagined plague diary

For those with an open mind about what cinema can be. Jerry Garanyan, an ambulance-chasing San Francisco lawyer, is a camera buff and a dogged collector of moving images. Though his legal career is a dead end which nevertheless pays his bills, he lives for the ordinary ghosts, extraordinary shadows, and fugitive moments he has preserved forever in his personal library of 8mm celluloid. As his dearest sister reckons with losing her hearing, he is targeted for an elaborate con by smooth film world scam artists who purport to represent the "real movies."

Clara grew up in the Belize jungles but was sent to live in San Francisco after a childhood trauma. Her older boyfriend, Gabriel encourages a trip back to her jungle home. Once arriving, the familiar faces and tropic environment fills Clara with hope for a brighter future. She's soon reminded that the jungle has a dark side and begins to realize that Gabriel may have an even darker one himself.

Traumatized by his recent divorce, lovelorn Stanley takes off cross country to San Francisco, landing at his enterprising sister Nancy's doorstep. Nancy, who makes counterculture cinema-themed t-shirts, lives in "Camille's Castle," a frozen-in-time legacy home for displaced artists and outcasts. Together, they search for the remaining scraps of San Francisco's Summer of Love, and wind up at odds with each other. Countercurrents is an aggressive tribute to the counterculture films of the late 60's, with "easter eggs" in no short supply.

Irving Rapper is, in many ways, Hollywood's forgotten man. After getting his start as a "dialogue director" at Warner Bros. in the mid 30's, he became synonymous with the studio's "women's pictures" and rose in prominence as one of Bette Davis's most consistent collaborators, including on her biggest commercial success, Now Voyager (1942). He was a rebel who led the studio in suspensions for chronically refusing to direct the scripts handed to him by the brass, waiting instead for material that better suited his interests and thematic preoccupations. He was also one in a secretive fraternity of gay directors who had to conceal their identities and shield their private lives from potential public ruination. Daniel Kremer takes you through an unexamined and misunderstood life of a man of great artistic inclination who expressed his innermost yearnings covertly through his work in motion pictures.

Perhaps at first glance, the filmography of Silvio Narizzano appears unremarkable. Thanks to his sleeper hit Georgy Girl (1966), he's known largely as a "one-hit wonder" director. Upon closer inspection, however, likely no other filmmaker used cinema as effectively to exorcise personal demons in ways both ugly and beautiful. And few directors' sensibilities were more gay, both overtly and covertly. Film historian Daniel Kremer is your tour guide through an obscure, perplexing body of work heretofore ignored and often unfairly shunned. Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano is an essay documentary of discovery.

Worlds collide in this unconventional essay film, when filmmaker, film historian, and archivist Daniel Kremer seamlessly edits Michelangelo Antonioni's legendary but controversial counterculture art film Zabriskie Point (1970) into the same narrative universe as Stanley Kramer's madcap epic comedy extravaganza It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). In creating these new sequences, Kremer comes to recognize that the exercise effortlessly draws cultural and historical parallels in twentieth-century American life that echo in present-day America. The editorial mashups weave a tangled web of social and cinematic history that root our notions of Americana in the mythology of the desert. As Kremer expounds in his narration on these often astonishing and sometimes shocking associations, his very personal ties to the subject matter become manifest.

A ten-year drought brings local ranches to the brink of disaster. The search for Bert Neville takes its toll on Rail and Mitra. They break up and Rail continues on alone. Travis, Ziggy and Karin hitchhike in high country and get lost in a burnt out forest. Taylor travels with Ukrainian gallery owners looking for the prototypical western artist. Dane introduces Rail to his mother, Violet, a full blood hewise, who remembers the horrors of the Indian schools. Her ex-husband Bedford refuses to give his real name to a white man. Her daughter April broadcasts a tribal blog on indian affairs. Dane and Rail are stopped by local militia types. Entrepreneurs propose a geothermal plant to ranchers and locals divided by political views. Rail finds an old map in an abandoned ranch and Mitra, now recovered, rejoins him. Is the mystery of Bert Neville about to be solved?

Eddie Huntly, an east coast radio personality, moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in what the police surmise was a simple mugging gone awry. As the sullen Eddie steps in as interim host of his old friend Dean's late-night talk-radio show, he obsessively makes regular visits to the forested spot where Neil's corpse was found. One such visit unleashes a chain of unpredictable events that sends Eddie snooping into the life of a sleepwalking drifter with a mysterious past.

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.

Sky-high housing costs, rents no one can pay, urban development, and street crime make life difficult for RV dwellers in Berkeley, California. City bureaucrats collaborate with real estate agents to gentrify neighborhoods forcing out already marginalized people living in cars, trucks, and RVs. With no more West to escape to, they contemplate turning back East.

David Cronenberg (the well-known Canadian director's American film-student counterpart) is making an ambitious "neorealist video feature" entitled "Wireless Internet", a didactic horror film about a contagious mind virus. The project gradually morphs into something well beyond the realm of fiction.

Carla Durkow 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, and the reading of his will.

We all know Jack Nicholson the actor. But few know the history of Jack Nicholson the screenwriter, and especially Jack Nicholson the director. Nicholson's lifelong friend, filmmaker Henry Jaglom, reflects on the icon's behind-the-camera career, while film historian/filmmaker Daniel Kremer presents and analyzes the full scope of that history.

Filmmaker Louis Malle worked adjacent to the French Nouvelle Vague, but was admittedly never fully part of it, cementing his reputation instead with films like Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Zazie dans le Metro (1960), and Murmur of the Heart (1971), among others. In 1978, he made his first English-language picture, the highly controversial Pretty Baby, produced by Paramount Pictures. For the next decade and a half, he continued working in the English language, mostly in the United States, with films as varied as Atlantic City (1980), My Dinner With Andre (1981), Crackers (1983), Alamo Bay (1985), Damage (1992), and Vanya on 42nd Street (1992). What distinguishes these seven Anglophone films from Malle's previous Francophone films? And when Louis Malle arrived to make pictures in America, what did he see? What did America mean to Louis Malle?

A husband-and-wife pair of retired cult deprogrammers experience marital strife when their past catches up with them.

Two brainy 18-year-olds, recent high-school graduates with fine future prospects, get married and then 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.

Peter Medak's films toy with notions of cosplay, masquerade, gamesmanship, and how power and permission structures figure into these human diversions. His filmography includes The Ruling Class (1972), The Changeling (1980), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1971), The Krays (1990), and others, all which capitalize on these ideas. Sanity is fragile, ephemeral, and suspended from a very thin tether in all his films. This piece gets to the bottom of why Medak centers his work on such themes, and why they carry biographical weight for him personally.

Ambitious film students Jim and Laura and their nihilist, restless group of film student friends decide to adapt Macbeth and shoot it with a mostly homeless cast. Jim and his friends search for locations in abandoned buildings in Philadelphia and it's in one such building that their own story takes a very unexpected and cinematic turn.

Eccentric, bored recent widower Si Foster, a self-proclaimed eggplant connoisseur, is 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, he finally gets up the nerve to contact the kidnappers and pay the ransom. He 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. 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.