Philip Rabalais

A break from our regularly scheduled programming.

On a pivotal ballet performance night, Annie, a reluctant dancer battling an injury and uncertainty, faces the pressures of her mother, family tensions, a ready-to-rise younger sister, and Juilliard scouts in the audience.

This boat is out of control!

A fragile young woman takes her lifelike doll out in public for the first time, but a visit to the natural history museum triggers a dark childhood memory, forcing her to confront reality and let go.

At Wisconsin Dells, the world capital of water parks, foreign students are employed on summer work visas. This programme, presented as an immersion into American culture, is also a way of profiting from cheap labour. An inspired portrait of contemporary America through the eyes of this young generation.

Charging scenes of the present with dystopian speculation, "Field Resistance" blurs the boundaries between documentary filmmaking and science fiction to investigate overlooked environmental devastation in the overlooked state of Iowa. Footage collected from disparate locations—a university herbarium, karst sinkholes inhabited by primordial flora and fauna, a telecommunication tower job site, a decaying grain silo, among others—interlocks to evoke a narrative of present danger and future disaster, of plant expansion and humanity's retreat. The film rejects the human individual as the focus of narrative cinema, and, instead, adopts the perspective of a symbiotic "implosive whole" in which human and nonhumans are related in an overlapping, non-total way.

During a party at her house, when a young woman comes out to the backyard, a series of interactions with her friends leads her to question if she is making the right choice to go back to Iran to visit a dying family member, at a time of chaos and uncertainty.