Hierophany

Alice is a college freshman aiming for law school. On the day her financial aid is cut, her secret identity is revealed to her classmates.

A visually stunning narrative documentary, NAKED GARDENS immerses audiences in the complex, unseen world of a family nudist resort in the Florida Everglades. Filmed over one season at this lush tropical campsite, the film follows the stories of individuals drawn to an unusual community, which promises both non-conformist values and, more importantly for some, a cheap place to live. As aging owner Morley and his residents prepare for the largest gathering of nudists in the US, the Mid-Winter Naturist Festival, they are faced with challenges both as a community and as individuals.

In Pahokee, Florida, the myth of the absent Black father is contradicted every day: housework, children’s birthdays, neighbourhood, care. In vignettes brimming with solidarity, Contento traces out his protagonists’ self-confidence. Calm and attentive.

A woman fully immersed in her paintings finds her only human contact in the form of a man whom she employs to erase them.

Suspicious his brother is stealing from him, Lucas goes on a search through town to confront the problem.

A non-binary queer teen cultivates community, individuality, and resilience through the subculture of the DIY punk scene in Little Village.

A small supermarket somewhere in the American backwoods. The staff come in early, drink coffee and restock the shelves. They chat about the air conditioning, would like to read poetry in peace and sometimes even get lucky on the slot machine.

"As we live our lives in minute-after-minute sequential time, we know that something else exists beyond its borders: the all-at-once ceremonial time, the time of ecstatic fire that pierces the membranes separating the now from eternity. [It] is an invocation of ceremonial time, performed by several friends... and played out amid the cane fields of south Florida. For these teen boys, who are high school footballers, JROTC cadets, and weekend rabbit-hunters, the leap into ceremonial time is made via their discovery of the 12th-century Persian poem of the title, in which the world’s birds gather to seek out their king. As the poem’s stanzas flow on, their present-tense life is infused with the past; they become Silk Road merchants, desert water-bearers, sainted martyrs. The Conference of the Birds exists within this metamorphosis, capturing its central band of seekers in their plain-clothes reality and at the same time wrapping them in robes of myth." -Jonathan Kieran