Out of the Woods

Set in Port Townsend, San Francisco, and the "bardo terrains of the soul realm," this promising 70-minute debut feature (shot in Hi-8 and 3/4" video and Super 8 film) is a visionary exploration of an elderly bedridden man's interior journey toward death and beyond. It's also a sometimes humorous, sometimes heartrending portrayal of his family's changing perceptions of the process of death. It follows the final day in the life of an elderly patriarch who has lapsed into an intermittent coma. As he dies, his son returns home to visit the family, where he unexpectedly participates in an ancient ritual of ancestral origins.

The power of a long-buried family secret becomes unleashed when the extreme rituals of a young punk rocker catapults his consciousness into the spirit realm in search of his Finnish father, a ship captain who drowned in the Bering Sea. His father's mother was a Sami sorceress whose shamanic powers were passed on to her grandson, powers tested as he enters the mythic dreams of his Finnish grandfather. A surrealistic fable of true love, giant hedgehogs, and the mystical depths of ancestral bonds.

A Croatian soldier turned boxer is haunted by disturbing dreams of the Virgin Mary that lead him to post-911 America (Oakland) to fulfill a religious vision in this suspenseful and timely look at the violence underlying any form of fundamentalism. Made in the months following the 9/11 attacks, the film offers a warning to anyone who misreads religious texts as a means to profaning the holiness of life.

A bemused time-traveling librarian named Flux from the serenity of 2023 to the chaos of Seattle in 1999, where he uncovers video footage from a riot that triggered the city's collapse. Society's obsession with communications technology has created the near-extinction of conversation. People communicate via e-mail and videofax; the film's few face-to-face encounters have a sourish, sitcom-type sting.

An elite A.I.coder faces a collision between the algorithms of the VR worlds he's creating and the archetypal dimensions of the greater Collective Unconscious. He finds solace in a rural farmhouse he rents from a Professor of Psychology who lives next door with a student he mentors on her dreams. Over two days, the dreams of all three impact their daily discourse in unexpected ways unhinging their lives through a vortex of a greater reality. BLUE FIRE spins the controversial A.I. phenomena beyond the consensus narrative of destroying the world VS. saving the world towards a radical vision of the future.

Alice, a college Professor of Comparative Religious Studies, meets an enigmatic older woman who roams the campus, sleeps under a bridge, and rattles her with disturbing insights that forever alters the course of her existence.

The elder Magus of the Thelemic Temple of Horus is on his deathbed when his biological son fraudulently inherits The Temple. Jack Mason - a promising young sex magickian and rightful heir to the Temple - plots revenge and falls into a delirious maze of underworld encounters with professional psychopaths, desert brujas, and a twist of fate he never saw coming. Or did he? Meanwhile, Jack assigns his two hot-headed apprentices the ego-corrosive ritual of going into business as clowns in this harrowing, hilarious collision between the contrary occult worlds of urban and rural sorcery.

The routines of four roomates and their landlord are unexpectedly interrupted by the news of an alleged bioterrorist attack in their city. Ona, a webcast diva with her own show, thinks the feds are staging this attack to shift into a fullblown police state. Her roomies think she's paranoid. During a 48-hour citywide bio-hazard lockdown, they are all forced to come to their own conclusions about what is happening during their current state of escalating uncertainty.

With recent advances in Russia's remote viewing experiments, coupled with the measured use of their new designer drug C-9, operatives now locate their targets by entering their dreams.

Disenchanted with the corruption of society, Jacob joins a Zen monastery. One day his meditation practice ignites a spontaneous out of body experience, compelling him to explore the more esoteric dimension of astral travel where he discovers bizarre new worlds that shake and alter the very ground of his being.

A theater troupe camps out in a forest to perform their director's vision of Antonin Artaud's magic theater of ghosts, gods and spirits. During their forest experiment Alex, the director, is haunted by disturbing dreams where Artaud appears and mocks his ambitions. When these strange nightmares persist, Alex stops sleeping in an attempt to regain control over his mind. Sleep-deprived and with his sanity pushed to its limits, he seeks help from a Psychotherapist who suggests hypnosis as a means to uncover the source of his problems. What follows is a psychic journey through the internal landscape of Alex's subconscious memories and dreams, a sojourn that leads us to a place beyond belief, beyond words, and beyond the mind itself.

1908, Paris. Over three fever-dream nights in the Hotel Biron, poet Rainer Maria Rilke encounters the ghost of his good friend, artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died shortly after giving birth to her first child. In response to this haunting, Rilke writes his epic prose lament, "Requiem for a Friend", as a tribute to Paula and to women torn between choosing a life sacrificed to Art or to Motherhood. One hundred years later, three women - a painter, an actress and a dancer - and a theatre director prepare to stage Rilke's "Requiem" in Berkeley California as abstract performance ritual.

A VideoPoem by Antero Alli adapting Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Movement" as translated by Louise Varese and read by Alli.

To escape heartbreak, Hope writes herself into a short story as a character who falls in love with the story's central character with unexpected real world consequences.