Thomas Logoreci

It all started out innocently enough. Filmmaker and thirty-year veteran of the Albanian movie industry, Kujtim Cashku, attempted to hold a press conference to discuss a land dispute with his film academy and city officials. No one could believe what happened next in the former communist nation. Led by an half-drunk bureaucrat in long overcoat and fedora, police disrupted the peaceful gathering then tried to seize the school's garden and open air cinema. Gentian Koci's doc captures the dramatic days that followed when students, professors, activists and lovers of cinema battled to save the outdoor movie screen from destruction by police and corporate interests.

Just moments before his third wedding, Zahedi relates with utter sincerity and astonishing candor his obsession with prostitutes. He retraces his romantic and sexual history, including his ideological commitment to open relationships, that led to two disastrous marriages and several very pissed off ex-girlfriends.

Sixty years after the nuclear devastation, a few survivors cling to life in a ruined industrial zone. Ten-year-old Niko lives with his grandfather Lexi, convinced that their territory is a "paradise" worth defending. Lexi indoctrinates Niko to hate the rival survivors across the railroad tracks. A violent confrontation with a feral child triggers a brutal conflict in which the children serve the adults' power struggles. As the adults' violence escalates, Niko realizes that Lexi is not the man he thought he was. The arrival of Xeni's family reveals that borders are a prison, and escape threatens deadly consequences for the children.

Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."

On January 1st, 1999, Caveh Zahedi started a one-year video diary. The idea was to shoot one minute each day. This is the result.

On Valentine's Day, 1993, Caveh Zahedi decided to ingest 5 grams (a very large dose) of hallucinogenic mushrooms. For the first time in his mushroom-taking history, he had an experience of "divine possession," in which he felt that a divine being took possession of his body and spoke through him, in a voice that was not his, and with knowledge that he himself did not possess. He later tried several times to repeat the experience. I WAS POSSESSED BY GOD is the documentary record of one such attempt.

For 17 years, filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt filmed his daughter Ella on her birthday in the same spot, asking her the same questions. In just 29 minutes, we watch her grow from a toddler to a young woman with all the beautiful and sometimes awkward stages in between. Each phase is captured fleetingly but makes an indelible mark. Her responses to her father’s questions are just a backdrop for a deeper story of parental love, acceptance, and ultimately, independence.