Dir: Madsen Minax
Website: actorslashmodel.com
Representing the whole lives of transgender and gender variant musicians, each story is one of a journey in progress through a first-hand perspective of the intersections between gender performance and stage performance. Riot Acts allows a particular niche of transgender existence to be revealed and celebrated. Discussed topics include songwriting, voice presentation, coping with voice changes, passing/not passing, presenting a body/bodies on stage, audiences, venues, the idea of the spectacle, societal and media representation, performing gender and notions about "drag," and the personal as political, culminating with the notions that identities and bodies are undeniably political, and that the trans experience isn't always one of tragedy. The individuals and bands featured in Riot Acts are celebrated as talented, inspiring, sexy, critical and fully three-dimensional in a manner that purposefully counters the vision of isolation and destitution frequently portrayed in mainstream media. As transpeople ourselves, the producers seek to capture trans and gender variant identities as complexly as they are embodied and performed, both on and off the stage. Whether a personal journey, a political journey, or a literal journey, the aspect of travel, through years or miles, is a binding stylistic element throughout Riot Acts. In-depth interviews are spliced carefully abed travel and performance footage, while sequences are juxtaposed visually by the mergers of 16mm film, super 8 film, video and still imagery. Furthermore, experimental uses of audio and sound as well as the complexity of the original music of the interviewees themselves, forms a truly mixed media documentary.

Dir: Dr. Rakhmiel Peltz
This film, produced by the Judaic Studies Program at Drexel University, tells the poignant life story of survivor Toby Knobel Fluek, author of Memories of My Life in a Polish Village (Knopf, 1990) and Passover as I Remember It (Knopf, 1994). It explores Toby's childhood in a small Polish village, her war experiences, and her current life in the United States. Its drawings, paintings, music, first-person narrative, and Toby's magnetic personality express a combined message that provides a unique stimulus for Jewish continuity.

Dir: Brendan O'Neill Kohl
Day Labor is a ten minute short that follows Sammy, a hard drinking Seattle bike messenger, as he pedals his way through the rainy gray winter. After a particularly rough night Sam wakes up hung over and miserable. As Sam struggles through his morning ride into town he passes the crowds of Latin Day Laborers looking for work. In a moment of inspiration, Sam sets off a sequence of events that spirals out of control. Featuring a cast of over fifty, Day Labor addresses important contemporary social issues with humor and grace. All the actors appearing as day laborers in the film were actual Day Laborers hired on the street the day of filming. Likewise, all the bike messengers were actual messengers, though some now left unemployed by the economic decline. This cast lends the film a powerful authenticity and captures a gritty side of Seattle rarely shown in cinema. Day Labor tells a story that resonates with every urban center in the nation and beyond. A marginalized work force is made public and issues of work ethic, opportunity and disparity are presented as the common practice of outsourcing labor is taken to its illogical extreme.

Dir: Ming Lai
In "Journey of a Paper Son," an elderly Chinese man (Jack Ong), who's dying from cancer, shocks his family when he reveals that he's a "paper son" (one who illegally immigrated to the U.S., using fake documents and claiming he's the son of an American citizen) and asks them for a final wish to change back his name. His request threatens to tear apart his family (Patty Toy Chung, Angelina Cheng, Teddy Chen Culver), testing the limits of their love. Meanwhile, his doctor (Mario Cortez) desperately tries to save him.

Dir: Ellen Brodsky
Website:ellenbrodskyfilms.com
Only One Boss' proves that everything we know about conflict, we learned in pre-school. This nine-minute film invites you to laugh and cringe as a pair of three-year old friends raise questions about relationships and power. Mia and Grant adore each other. Then they start analyzing a video that shows one of their fights from six months earlier. Along the way, they end up in one disagreement after another, even coming to blows before they finish. Years later, Mia and Grant watch again as twelve-year olds. Together with the audience, the two adolescents witness familiar routines of the adult world already playing out in pre-school.

Dir: James Garcia Sotomayor
Taught to hate: The story of an Hispanic immigrant trying to find a job in America and an American family who's uncle's racial intolerance has a strong effect on his Nephew.

Dir: Michela Occhipinti
"The world runs. Hari walks. His worn-out shoes cover long distances in the desert to deliver messages that are closed in letters with a precious handwriting for addressees who live in remote villages, cloistered in a forgotten temporal dimension, out of this world. The letters talk about loves, weddings, successes and deceases, those that bear news of death are immediately recognizable, the envelopes with the right corner torn off, those that Hari reads out in the doorway, and then tears to bits, because bad news must be destroyed, scattered, deleted forever. In a world in which time is luxury, speed is synonymous with efficiency and civilization, and in which people communicate pressing buttons that reproduce identical characters, the story of Hari is an island fossilized in time. When the only way to communicate was a sheet of paper, a pen, some ink. When people were still able to wait. A return to slowness, and to nature, the harsh nature of the Thar desert. Until some weird metallic tower arrive, as intruders in the landscape, to revolutionize the life of the small village…"

Dir: Lee Yat Fung
Fong Muk Wing (Wing), A graduate Student from Film School worked with Lee Yat Fung (Fung), an independent filmmakers. Wing finally realize that Fung was a person, which very out of his expectation. From this moment, there are some changes in Wing's mind which is beyond the ordinary.

Dir: Stan Woodward
Website:stanwoodward.com
From his days when he brought his unique Piedmont blues beat from South Carolina playing his electronic bass guitar with the Muddy Waters Chicago Blues Band, Mac Arnold left the blues world and ended up taking over his family's farm in South Carolina...until he was discovered by a young harmonica player who so love the blues that he pursued Mac for 10 years until he convinced him to let the harmonica player find musicians like him who wanted to play under a blues legend like Mac, who could connect them to the authentic Chicago blues made famous by the legendary Muddy Waters. Mac Arnold and Plate Full O' Blues cut their 1st CD and performed music from it in 2005 - and filmmaker. Stan Woodward went backstage and interviewed Mac. 'I knew right away that here was a Southern Americana blues roots story that I had to capture on video. 170 hours of footage and three years later I concluded following Mac Arnold step by step as he re-entered the blues world, having been reunited with all the blues legends who played with him in Chicago along the way. The film ends up at the First Annual Mac Arnold Cornbread and Collardgreens Blues Festival in Greenville, SC that occurred in April of 2007 - Mac's dream festival where he is able to reunite old Muddy Waters blues musicians onstage with his band.

Dir: Robert D. Miles
Website: birdseyeviewthemovie.com
To summarize, BIRD’S EYE VIEW is a complex, fiction film containing within its framework an explosive documentary made by the main character.  This is the story of Cleo, where a dark truth hides beneath the glistening surface of a perpetual smile, a happy face concealing the mystery of a secret past.
Puzzled by the bizarre, untimely death of her exotic pet, Cleo embarks on a journey of discovery where her research will shatter her view of reality, and herself. Cleo’s documentary, seen in intermittent sound-bites throughout the story, contains interviews with real witnesses, and real evidence, exposing a government cover-up of cosmic proportions, perpetrated not only on the American people, but also on the population at large.
The movie has been shot on six continents, including several highly unusual, almost inaccessible locations, never before seen in any film.  The beautiful, exotic cinematography creates a magnificent backdrop for the dramatic expose of decades of lies by the United States government, systematically discrediting all witnesses and victims of a phenomenon they prefer to deny.
The almost fifteen years dedicated to creating BIRD’S EYE View were devoted to research, the documentary interviews, and also, creating the complex fictional comedy/mystery/fable, a parable of good and evil, the satirical morality play, which gives the expose an ethical context, while simultaneously bringing a vast, uncharted subject down to a very heartfelt and personal level.

Dir: EunHee Huh
Website:myheartbeatsmovie.com
A poor and lonely English professor, Juri (37), decides to become a porn actor using a mask to hide herself, after she watches unusual porn. She visits Myung-sook, a porn producer, despite their separation of 10 years. Juri endures rigorous military-style training in addition to extreme dieting to be casted in porn. Finally, she stars along with an attractive young porn star, Byul (20), whose goal is to become a professor. However on the set, Juri keeps pushing Byul away, and nobody knows her secret. Juri's story is about a middle-aged woman who seeks a real heart to fulfill her life in the very brutal world of adult entertainment. It is a comic, erotic and somehow sad story of our dreams.

Dir: Jamie Moffett
Website:returntoelsalvador.com
"17 years ago, U.N. Peace Accords marked the end of a brutal civil war in El Salvador. This film is the compelling story of vibrant Salvadoran individuals and communities and the intricate geo-political systems that have so profoundly impacted their lives, making this distant war relevant to a current American audience."

Dir: Fiona Cochrane
Music affects our development from the womb to the grave. This documentary examines the role music plays in developing our brains as humans, beginning with premature infants in neonatal intensive care wards, moving through the role of music in enhancing performance in childhood (including discussion of the Mozart effect), the role of music therapy in hospitals, and finally looking at the elderly. Music is good for our health - and this documentary shows you how and why

Dir: Bruce Bryant
Website:andersonfairthemovie.com
"For forty years, Houston's legendary folk and acoustic music venue, Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant, has fostered and nurtured some of the most important musical performers and songwriters in America including Grammy Award-winning artists Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams. Lyle Lovett says, "Without Anderson Fair, I wouldn't have been driven to try to write songs the way I was." Recalling her early development as a songwriter, Nanci Griffith says, "I wasn't yet that confident with my songwriting and Anderson Fair gave me that confidence." For The Sake Of The Song: The Story of Anderson Fair is the captivating saga of one of Texas' and America's unsung cultural treasures. This film explores the significant role "the Fair" has played in preserving an American musical tradition and how a devoted family of artists, volunteers and patrons, transformed a politically subversive little coffee house and restaurant into a unique American music institution. Anderson Fair has stubbornly bucked the odds and survived for four decades because of the dedication of a community of people with a common vision—nothing gets in the way of the music. It has always been and is still run by volunteers; no one is paid. And its struggle to survive in many ways mirrors the struggle of the individual artists. For The Sake Of The Song tells the tale of one small place where the sound is true, the spotlight gentle, the applause encouraging, and big things happen."

Dir: NATHANIEL KRAMER
A LONG HAUL is a documentary depicting the struggles of a charter boat captain whose seasonal summer business has fallen prey to a bad economy, high fuel prices, loss of customers and depleted fish populations He is forced to moonlight as a captain on a broken down commercial fishing trawler to make ends meet. If successful working for the trawler's owner, the captain will be able to run the boat during the winter when there is no charter business at all. Desperate to climb out from under a heap of personal debt and under pressure from the owner to get the boat fishing and make money, the captain sets sail for a three day offshore trip to net squid. At the captain's side is his loyal first mate, and a 13 year old boy from a wealthy family working for the captain as a summer job..The boat has not been fished in months and is has become saddled with mechanical problems which compound the pressure on the crew to catch squid. Over the next three days, the crew will face sleep deprivation, rough seas, mechanical problems and the difficult task of finding and catching squid.

Dir: Ronnie Cramer
Website:cultfilms.net
Six-hundred-five film clips are assembled and used to create a piece of electronic music. As the visual component appears in the center of the screen, the original analog audio is sent to the left channel while it is simultaneously converted into digital music data and sent to the right channel. The digital data is also transposed into traditional musical notation and displayed on the screen as it is converted. The film includes an animated 'chalkboard' introduction that explains the entire process.

Dir: Elyce Strong
Amber & Andre is the story of a young couple very much in love, but from two vastly different worlds. The film explores the theme of acceptance within love as Amber prepares to take Andre home to meet her parents for the first time.

Dir: Dan Pardue
"Brian and Christie are best friends. When they are not laughing with each other and playing video games, Brian and Christie are practicing for the upcoming Duo Debate Competition state finals. Scene partners in this debate, the two prepare for could be their final months with each other, as Christie desperately hopes to win a scholarship from the competition and leave their hometown. Realizing that this may be the last leg of their years long friendship, Christie makes Brian an offer that shocks him and changes the way he perceives their friendship: if he wants to, they can sleep together. Christie's suggestion leads to an afternoon tryst that will forever change both their lives and alter their otherwise indestructible friendship forever. Brian's first sexual experience, riddled with awkward and funny moments that make it far from ideal, strengthens his feelings for Christie into a teenage interpretation of love. That fateful day creates a riff in what seemed to be an indestructible partnership as the big competition date arrives. Unable to control his feelings of love for Christie, and unwilling to let her leave him behind, Brian's emotions come to a head at the "duo" competition, where he alters their scene and subsequently their futures forever. Part comedy and part coming of age story, Duo explores the relationship of two best friends, and the hilarious and heartbreaking elements of growing up and growing apart."

Dir: Gary Ravenscroft
Website:3thingsfilm.com
Charlie Capen and Rachel Jackson, co-writers, producers and stars of 3Things met two years ago for a cup of coffee after several months of not seeing each other. Friends who have worked together creatively many times before, realized at this meeting that they were both going through difficult times. Rachel was dealing with the lesser crisis, a loss of a long time boyfriend and Charlie dealing with a more intense situation; sifting through journals and tapes of his prolific writer/radio talk show host father who had just passed. The conversation quickly turned to a discussion about the effect created by important people in our lives and that no matter how transitory or how stable, everyone we meet makes an indelible impression on our lives.