The Way It Is

Small-town gangsters and ambitious young girls meet in "Dreamland", where they exchange nervous kisses and green banknotes.

A courier who represents Moroccan dissidents arrives in Washington with secret documents.

A domestic accident causes a quiet and simple man to undergo drastic personality changes which will takes him to New York’s underground nightclubs.

Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites including Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse loft with a peeling-paint dome serves as an echoey stand-in for the imperial palace. The latter location required ingenuity: Posing as potential renters, Nares and associates asked the manager to show them the apartment, then unlocked the windows on the way out; a few hours later, they broke back into the space, full cast and crew in tow, to shoot the necessary scenes.

A mediocre musician goes on the road in search of the world's greatest guitar maker.

A French special op suffers an existential crisis as he wanders New York City in search of a mission and the requisite connections.

In downtown Manhattan, twentysomething Allie, whose father is not around and whose mother is institutionalized, is a big Charlie Parker fan. He almost subconsciously searches for meaning in his life and meets some idiosyncratic characters along the way.

An experimental drama that spins the tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama.

January 1966. In a Paris apartment, police discovers the corpse of Georges Figon, the man who broke the scandal of the Ben Barka affair and undermined Gaullist power.

A Private detective is hired to trace a woman who ran away and disappeared on her wedding day. The movie follows him and recounts the story of her life through her eyes and the eyes of those interviewed by the detective.

The Sunset Blvd. of underground cinema, and a suitably ambivalent retrospect on the star-game casualties of New York's upper depths, with Patti Astor statuesquely hysterical as a 20-year-old Norma Desmond, made up to recall Edie Sedgwick and surrounded by Warhol's lost children. We've been here before, but without the hindsight: a camera cruise along a hustler's meat-rack, kitchen-talk over cold canned spaghetti, Taylor Mead grimacing in a spastic dance, the silent stud a sullenly passive observer. Mitchell's ear for campy native wit and eye for figures in a loft-scape happily keep at bay the otherwise contagious NY ennui.

Sketched loosely, the narrative of Poe's first feature is as scrappy and paper-thin as its protagonist Rico, a self-styled loner in New York City circa 1976 who longs to inhabit the "New Wave" scene of mid-60s Paris. In Rico's day-to-day life as an unsuccessful photographer, he wearily searches for authentic connection-- even as he spouts the most inauthentic prose imaginable.

Eric Mitchell's debut film, shot in Super 8, stars Mitchell, Anya Phillips, Patti Astor, and Duncan Smith among a crowd of hip "poseurs," talking sex, manners, and politics.

The Levys, a glamorous couple, used to make their living robbing golfers, until they met their fatal handicap. Years later, scriptwriter Remy Gravelle decides to observe the Levy progeny as they sail endlessly round Manhattan in their luxury yacht.

Second feature film by the French-born director is a Bertolucci-style story of a bored, rich woman looking for romance and adventure. She meets an American G.I., dumps him, then falls for a Communist worker.

"Shortly after Amos went into home hospice he began filming ‘Adios’, a short film, compiled of 16mm and Super 8 footage, to premiere at his memorial, chronicling all the family and friends who have come to visit. Even Courtney our absolutely wonderful hospice nurse is in it. […] Only twice have we forgotten to film a visitor. Amos designated me the Director of Photography. Since I have to focus and shoot using my bad left eye the joke in our home is that it’s a film by a dying director and a blind DP." – Claudia Summers