
FAMILY PORTRAIT
director
Lucy Kerr
writers
Karlis Bergs & Lucy Kerr
duration
75’
featuring
Deragh Campbell (Anne at 13,000 ft.)
Chris Galust (Give Me Liberty)
Set at the dawn of Covid, Family Portrait follows a family on an idle morning when they have planned a group picture. After the mother vanishes and one daughter becomes desperate to find her and gather her sprawling family, the film progressively descends into a realm where time and space lose their grip, transforming the family portrait into a solemn and enigmatic ritual of transition.
STUCK
director | writer
Brittany Reeber
duration
10’
featuring
Fareeha Khan (Comedy Central’s Tight Five)
Max Lipshitz (Saint Frances)
Wanda, a hungover introvert, is oppressed by the big personalities of her housemates. They’ve roped her into a mime routine for their music video shoot. Feeling alienated and ridiculous, she finds a kindred spirit in a mouse stuck to a sticky pad in the kitchen. Will she set him free, or emulate the self-absorbed indifference of her roommates?
THE VIOLINIST
director | writer
Katy McCarthy
duration
15’
featuring
Bill Wise (Krisha, Apollo 10 1/2)
Cyndi Williams (Computer Chess)
Conservative Texas senator Julian Dobbs discusses his “heartbeat” bill with an interviewer, but something is off: tubes of blood connect him to an unconscious woman in a wheelchair. As the film shifts between past and present, the interview and Dobbs’ domestic life, we learn that Dobbs was kidnapped and connected to the woman (a violinist) against his will, and that he must keep her alive with his body for nine months.
LATE CODY
director | writer
Stephen Billick
duration
15’
featuring
John Bradford
Sonny Carl Davis (Last Night at the Alamo)
Former rodeo rider Cody Burnet enters the empty Devil’s Backbone Bar like a black-hat sort of bad cowboy, but when he engages in conversation with a mysterious woman who invites herself to his table, we learn that Cody has paid a group of West Texans to get a couple of Mexican children across the border to reunite with their parents. As he pays off the woman with a handful of bills, mysteries start to work their way into the narrative. But death is lurking around the edges of the story. Something in the deal has gone wrong. As Cody is approached by a long-haired man his age, the bar now incongruously packed with revelers, the story repeats and confuses, but the reality of his situation becomes clear. Cody’s long gone.