Animal Husbandry

A woman is obsessed with a mysterious black box.

The Elliot estate was once a thriving plantation, but by the 19th century, the family has crumbled under the weight of its own excesses. If sordid sexuality and insanity don't claim their lives, a malevolent force lurking on the land certainly will. Is it a supernatural entity, or simply the poverty-stricken locals seeking revenge? In between the killings, which are regarded with mild interest at best by the surviving members of the family, dysfunctional relationships play out in slow motion. There is an unhappy marriage, affairs with servants, homosexual trysts... Marj Dusay and Ryan Foley star in this award-winning chiller from auteur Andrew Repasky McElhinney.

Based on the 1928 novella written by Georges Bataille, the film takes place in a seemingly abandoned house where a group of people engage in bizarre wordless acts. Just as the book does, the film spans several vignettes.

A poor but talented little drummer boy seeks to win the friendship of the pretty girl he knows from the playground. Loaded with humanity, pageantry, sentiment and laugh-out-loud humor, Christmas Dreams is wordlessly told through color, movement and dance. A talented little Drummer Boy seeks to win the friendship of the Pretty Girl from the playground. He dreams an enchanted Christmastime world that fantastically the Pretty Girl shares.

Magdalen is a tavern Scheherazade, a prostitute who sells stories in a seedy Philadelphia dive bar. Her clients include Mr. Jones, an angry black businessman who wants to hear the same graphic, sexual fantasy every night; Jace, a droll, Mishima-loving slacker/writer looking for an ending to his novel; Phil, a precocious skater-boy who wants to understand his dead father; and Edward, a shy 53-year-old virgin looking for love. Alix D. Smith is Magdalen McElhinney, a tough, brainy femme noir, whose name suggests that the film's director is the father she talks about obsessively. Littered with literary and cinematic allusions, the film's narrators make Magdalen part Warholian confessional and part Brechtian taproom comedy.

A disembodied voice struggles to make ethical judgements about a sinister experiment.