Work on Me

A man and his grandmother hide out from an ominous broadcast. The Grim Reaper hosts a TV show. The formerly incarcerated recount and reinterpret their first days of freedom. A suburban mom's life is upturned by the beast growing inside of her. And a high school gym teacher runs drills from inside a volcano. What happens when five of independent film's most adventurous filmmakers join together to literally adapt each other’s dreams for the screen?

Sam, newly a mother, shops at a supermarket with her baby and husband Carlson. She throws a neighborhood shishkabob party and has a family Sunday breakfast. But through her smiles and picturesque tasks, there's a suppression. Sam’s grown something she can no longer contain. This breaking point is the film SWALLOWED, where psychological horror meets dance.

A naked body moves a stranger to empathy. Inspired by The Kuleshov Effect, a dizzying provocation on art and objectification.

Sleeping With Frank shows a slice of a morning in Queens, NY. A couple readies for the day. Wake-up, get dressed, eat breakfast. The tableaux are familiar: cozy, rote, intimate and distant. Dance and choreographed gestures reveal a potent underbelly to the lacquer of such domestic normalcy

An innocent tourist travels to LA and unexpectedly conjures her sister's last night alive. Bold score, stylized dance and an eccentric cast, shot at The Standard Hotel, weave a dark and luminous film that revamps traditional narrative.

This is the first in Lily Baldwin's Paperback Movie Project. Each short film is an interpretation of a novel and explores the fluid relationship between a reader and the characters she is reading. What happens if you you fall into your book? A JUICE BOX AFTERNOON is a romantic and violent dream filled with stylized dance and pop-mash-up lullabies, that tells the story of Anne Morrow Lindbergh through her own writing as she comes of age, meets Charles Lindbergh, and experiences flight in more ways than one.

This docu-dream is a story without words using the language of movement. Through a vivid and surreal landscape, each person encounters a series of distinct individuals and slowly rediscovers a larger collective body. Terrain is a dancing unison of difference. Our bodies bridge gaps between worlds, and with this we invent a new kind of non-verbal truth. This new interconnectedness propels us back to life again, essentialized by our shared sense of interbeing.

Misty Copeland was promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre in 2015, becoming the first Black American ballerina to do so in the elite classical company's 75-year history. Misty sheds light on beating all odds through a difficult upbringing and learning ballet at 13 years old. She also expresses the importance of giving back to the communities she hopes to inspire. Friends and colleagues also share their admiration for the prominent dancer and advocate.

Seen through the voyeurism of glass pane, this is the story of 1960's coiffed etiquette gone awry. Dancing bodies reveal a meaty subtext as all protocol gets unhinged.

A crew of strangers converge over a quick slice inside a NYC pizza shop - a casual community hub. When a “contaigent” enters, dance turns inconsequential moments into idiosyncratic gestures, toggling between task and Bob Fosse-inspired choreography. Subtle and disorientating editing crafts an intimate dream between strangers.

A story told with gestures and glances. The tightness of a car is a perfect space for fantasy. Here two lovers' separate fantasies, “secret rooms” abut.

A young woman stumbles upon a seemingly empty estate. Hesitantly she enters and wanders its chilling insides: a Pandora's Box that entices and haunts her with a series of stylized dance tableaux. History reveals itself in these poignant flashes. She is in fact a ghost in her own home. Through a visceral, visually striking sequence of events, Sea Meadow revamps the thriller genre using dance, gesture and pop-music mashups to investigate the themes of identity, mortality and memory.

An unapologetic, uncensored, immersive look inside NYC youth culture.

This athletically vibrant and sensual experience explores love across a lifetime. Using dance to inhabit a common mortal story of love born, lived, lost, burned, and seemingly gone forever, THROUGH YOU is a live-action VR richly infused with an atmosphere of passion. Dancers Joanna Kotze and Marni Thomas Wood, along with actor Amari Cheatom, take us through the coursing periods of time, from the 1970s to 2046 and beyond, where the question is harbored, “Can love be found again?

In an old school dance studio on the Hudson River where Merce Cunningham and John Cage lived for years, one gesture is explored in varying speeds: removal.

Like the ebbs and flows of waves in the ocean, a woman rides out different stages of an anxiety attack and through memory and space regains control and relief.