Matthew Porterfield

When the buffet where Zeke's mom works closes down, he's forced to entertain the wild advances of a rich regular who is weirdly and vehemently obsessed with becoming his father.

Keith, a small-time drug dealer, is under house arrest at the home of his father in Baltimore. He re-enters a community scarred by unemployment, neglect and deeply entrenched segregation. There, he pushes back against his surrounding limitations as he tries to find a way out of his own internal prison.

When Taryn, a Northern Irish runaway, finds herself in trouble in Ocean City, MD, she seeks refuge with her aunt and uncle in Baltimore. But Kim and Bill have problems of their own: they’re trying to handle the end of their marriage gracefully for the sake of their daughter Abby, just home from her first year of college. A story of family revelations, looking for love and figuring out where to find it next.

Esther, an 18 year-old from the North of Mexico, wakes up in Mexico City overwhelmed and alone. She completes her morning rituals and leaves her apartment to look for work. Wandering the city streets, she attempts to connect with strangers she meets, including a young delivery man who she follows discreetly to the house of a mysterious woman. There, Esther finds a kindred spirit and a companion for the end of the world.

Friends and family of Cory, a young man who has died of an overdose, gather at a Baltimore-area karaoke bar for his wake and compare stories about him. Gradually, as it becomes clear that there are many holes in their recollections about Cory, they fill in the blanks by talking about things that reveal aspects of their own lives. Among those mourning him and searching for meaning are his cousin Jenny, his sister Zoe and his brother James.

In an unnamed city, a beauty salon becomes a space of passage where those cast out gather, suspended between life and death. At its center is the Individuo, a solitary presence who tends to this place without any promises or explanation. The film unfolds as time and place dissolve into one another. What is lived, remembered, and imagined coexists in a continuous movement, where meaning emerges through ritual, drifting, and return. Within this space, beauty and death are intertwined. The salon becomes a threshold where presence and memory fade and reappear, and where the boundaries between reality and vision begin to loosen. The outside world remains fractured, its tensions quietly permeating the space. As everything shifts, what emerges is a passage: a meditation on the fragility of existence.

An unconventional portrayal of several young women witnessed in immersive yet indeterminate states: within their bodies, among their friends and lovers, and ultimately in a culture of economic and spiritual recession. Obliquely inspired by Bela Bartok’s sole opera, Bluebeard’s Castle.

Chronicles two summer days in the life of a young recent family: Lena, 17, and Joe, 20, two recent and accidental parents residing in a diverse suburban neighborhood in northeast Baltimore City.