Unhappy Hour

Liz thinks she’s going on a date with Rob to see RoboCop, but things take an unexpected (and inexplicable) turn.

Camila, a young Argentine theater director, travels from Buenos Aires to New York to attend an artistic residency to develop a Spanish translation of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Upon her arrival, she begins to receive a series of mysterious postcards which set her down a winding path through her past and towards her future.

Daniela is unsure about what to do next and where to live. Mia is finishing a master’s degree that she spontaneously started. Along with Natascha, another friend thinking of moving to Vienna, they wander around and talk.

Mike may always be wandering, but you’d hardly call him a man on the move. His stamping ground is modest, the strip of suburbia between his mom’s house in New Jersey and the pizza place where he works. Mike’s no great conversationalist and isn’t big on direction either, preferring to let things happen than making them happen himself. Feeding a neighbour’s dog, bumping into a friend, catching a hockey game: all just different reasons to trudge along the same wintry streets, unhurried, ungainly, alone. One day, opportunity knocks. Mike bumps into his old school friend Mark, who asks Mike to take over his walking tour job and Philadelphia apartment during his trip to Poland. A change of season, a change of scene, a change of fortune? The streets Mike now wanders through are different and the sun is shining, but otherwise it’s the same old story: new people and new encounters, laced with the usual awkwardness and inertia.

Broken Specs follows Mike after he snaps his glasses in two and sets off on a day of running into people he only kind of knows.

The members of a reading group exchange cultural and literary references with such vigor that there’s little room for anything else: an attempt to leave the modern world behind or merely their own solitary existences?

Bobby drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, giving lifts to strangers on the way, sharing conversations that drift from the mundane to the deeply personal. In this tender portrait of today’s Europe, anonymity and warmth still go hand in hand.

A year in Berlin: Leonie wanders through the city and the texts of Anna Maria Ortese. Speaking with friends and translator Sigrid Vagt, she is also looking for the narrative threads of her own life. A film of reading shot in glowing, matter-of-fact 16mm.

A screen test for Classical Period.