Filmmakers Unite (FU)

A collection of shorts made by various directors in response to 9/11.

Alan Berliner uses the internet to track down 12 men who share his surname, and invites them over for dinner in New York.

Independent filmmaker Alan Berliner considers the power of photography and what may be lost as daily newspapers face extinction, in this documentary exploring his near-lifelong obsession with clipping and indexing photos.

A student film by a fledgling master––a single-shot "research report" on Berliner's experiences as the Harpur College Film Society projectionist.

"From there to here...from then to now. The soundtrack feature 33 frogs, 22 birds, lion growls, bomb whistles, a heartbeat and the chromatic scale."

Director Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of this affecting and graceful study of family history and memory. Ultimately this complex portrait is a meeting of the minds -- where the past meets the present, where generations collide and where the boundaries of family life are stretched, torn and surprisingly, at times, also healed. Berliner has transformed a story of a troubled man who has sealed himself off from life's pain into a work of universal resonance.

"...Berliner's film which talks about nature, culture, and technology impresses through its outstanding classical editing technique...Berliner finds precise and original transitions..."

THE FAMILY ALBUM is a one-hour experimental documentary film utilizing a vast collection of rare 16mm home movies from the 1920s through the 1950s. These home movies are exciting authentic documents of American folk history and culture, taken from the personal vantage point of the amateur photographic eye. Subjects span the entire spectrum of the traditional home movie idiom, including mixed racial, ethnic, economic and geographic sources. Structured from birth to death, THE FAMILY ALBUM is a collage film that weaves its elements into a composite lifetime, passing through the celebrations and struggles from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience. It is a universal yet intimate portrait of the American family, not scripted, not rehearsed, not immune to the conflicts and contradictions underlying family life and its rituals.

Filmmaker Alan Berliner chronicles his lifelong battle with insomnia in this intimate documentary. The cameras roll as he tries to quiet his overly active mind so he can get a decent night's sleep, capturing the details of what it's like to suffer from a chronic sleep disorder. As he struggles to find balance, his friends and family -- who endure the worst of Berliner's bouts with insomnia -- question whether he really wants to find a cure.

Alan Berliner has been chronicling the final years of his friend, cousin, and former mentor, Edwin Honig - distinguished poet, translator, critic, and teacher - into the depths of Alzheimer's disease. Among many other honors, Honig received honorary "knighthoods" from Spain and Portugal for his seminal translations of Lorca, Calderón, and Pessoa that awakened English-speaking readers to the work of these literary giants. This suite of six short films reveals a poet and wordsmith who may have lost his memory and his command of language, but still retains his sense of rhythm, rhyme and sublime musicality. And through it all, his dignity.

In this documentary we discover the dangerously funny cartoonist Mr. Fish, struggling to make a living in an industry that is dying out.

In a small, wooded town, a young man struggles to leave a secret militia started by his father.

Sequence of images created using a photocopier.

When young Rudolph is teased for his red nose and runs away from Christmastown, he sets off on a series of adventures, meets new friends Hermey the Elf and Yukon Cornelius along the way, and escapes the clutches of the Abominable Snow Monster. When an epic snowstorm threatens Christmas, can he rescue his family and friends and help Santa save the holiday?

A look at the mechanized nature of modern times.

A first love is corrupted as a man recalls his affair with a beautiful circus contortionist in this stop-motion animation of wooden mannequins.

A spirited Husky puppy looking for a home at a Christmas tree farm instantly bonds with a young boy visiting with his parents. As the boy rides away, unable to keep him, the pup escapes and embarks on a snowy journey to find his friend again.

Short avant garde film. Views of rippling water.

A man's strange obsession with dirt starts as a childhood game but eventually manifests on a surreal level.

A dark parody of the 1975 made-for-TV horror film Trilogy of Terror starring Karen Black. However, rather than being terrorized by fetish doll, it is Donald Trump.

Dark and humorous, this extremely short film features a stream-of-conscious look at the writing process, told with animated images straight from the subconscious, or somewhere.

Three women are in enclosed psychological zones that function as both refuge and jail.

A father takes us through one year of trying to teach a preschooler how to make a film.

Period Piece is a 30 min. documentary about menarche--a girl's first menstrual period--which is a fundamental experience in every woman's life, yet one that is rarely celebrated. Women of different ages (8-84) and multi-cultural backgrounds tell their menarchal stories.

An off-screen narrator remembers a time he was five years old, walking to school in a heavy rain, wearing a yellow slicker and cap. He relates to us that a boy he'd never seen before ran up to him and said that it was raining worms. Our lad of five is on the cusp between believing anything he hears and entering the age of reason. He asks for proof. He holds out his hand.


Faith and fear. Duck and cover. One response to 9/11.
 Official Selection, Toronto International Film Festival


Found Footage Rock Video

An imagined therapy session that obliquely suggests the seeds of "Trump" and the subsequent fear and anxiety he evokes.

A haunting and humorous film about romantic relationships and insects.

A mind-boggling "coincidence" leads the filmmaker to track down his fifth grade class – and fifth grade teacher – to examine their memory of and complicity in a bullying incident fifty years ago.

A 'dog-u-mentary' about birth, loss and near death. The film follows three adults and a dog named Lola through Lola's pregnancy, the birth of her puppies, and the loss of each puppy to their new owners. Often funny and ultimately sad, the piece explores our love and attachments to dogs and our projections onto animals.

Leper provides a rare and intimate glimpse into a contemporary society of lepers in a remote village in Nepal. Villages speak openly and emotionally about their relationship to their sickness, to the "healthy" community outside the village boundaries, and the myriad stigmas and misunderstandings which surround a disease that has marked their bodies and their lives.

Sky Burial follows the ritual of "jha-tor", the giving of alms to birds in a northern Tibetan monastery - where the bodies of the dead are offered to the vultures as a final act of kindness to living beings. At the Drigung Monastery lamas chant to call the consciousness from the body. Juniper incense is burned to summon the vultures. Special body breakers, or "rogyapas", unwrap the bodies and cut away the flesh. The bones are crushed and mixed with tsampa, roasted barley flour. The entire body is consumed by the birds, assuring the ascent of the soul. The sky, or the universe, is where the sacred world lies. To merge with the sky after death is a holy event, one that replaces the sufferings of this world with peace.

Made as a relief worker's master's thesis, this documentary chronicles the difficulties of rebuilding a community in post-Pol Pot Cambodia

Each year thousands of young girls are recruited from rural Burmese villages to work in the sex industry in neighboring Thailand. Held for years in debt bondage in illegal Thai brothels, they suffer extreme abuse by pimps, clients, and the police. The trafficking of Burmese girls has soared in recent years as a direct result of political repression in Burma. Human rights abuses, war and ethnic discrimination has displaced hundreds of thousands of families, leaving families with no means of livelihood. An offer of employment in Thailand is a rare chance for many families to escape extreme poverty. Sacrifice examines the social, cultural, and economic forces at work in the trafficking of Burmese girls into prostitution in Thailand. It is the story of the valuation and sale of human beings, and the efforts of teenage girls to survive a personal crisis born of economic and political repression.

The personal testimonies of the courageous Buddhist nuns who have led the nonviolent resistance against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

An eerily stylized deconstruction of exploitation and violence in life and cinema.

Formally, an intriguing depiction of video as forward motion, or as technology of road movies and dreams. Alshaibi intercuts footage of a Southeastern Asian trip with a young man’s venereal disease-influenced fantasies of a strange young woman.

Baghdad, Iowa is the mask, the shadow and the night stars that sing the sorrow song of death. You might be dreaming, so don't wake up until you arrive.

Chicago, 2008.

Experimental short made from a family recording.

A Coming of Arab story. Iraqi-American filmmaker Usama Alshaibi (Nice Bombs) shares his own story of experiencing racism in post-9/11 America. Showcasing the diversity of Arabs living in the United States, American Arab sparks a frank conversation about identity and perception, and argues for giving people "the space to be complicated."

Extreme experimental exploration of Muslim Fem Dom dominatrix trying to come to terms with her beliefs

An adventure in pornographic surrealism.

Directed by Usama Alshaibi.

Boy from War is an animated coming-of- age story of a young Arab American punk ricocheting between a war-torn Middle East and 1980s American Midwest. From LSD fueled encounters with Darth Vader and Saddam Hussein, to military pilots shot down into Iowa classrooms, Usama Alshaibi blends images and memories to give the audience a taste of what it was like living between two starkly different worlds, while never really fitting into either.

A documentary about a group of pilgrims who travel to Nepal to worship at the legendary Manakamana temple.

Amid the aftershocks of socialism's failure, a skeptical American watches three Croatian anarchists fight to create a new leftism.

This film uses the Reagan administration's internal documentation to capture the surreal spectacle of American might at its apex.

Yoni Brook and Pacho Velez's Mr. Yellow Sweatshirt presents New York City in a single-shot (from above) microcosm as an everyman struggles to enter the subway, a droll take on human-versus-machine.

A documentary about the concrete sections of the Berlin Wall that have been acquired by institutions or individuals since 1989 and are now scattered across the USA. Cherished or abandoned, they have become silent witnesses to recent history.

Comprised entirely of archival footage taken during those pre-reality-television years, The Reagan Show looks at how Ronald Reagan redefined the look and feel of what it means to be the POTUS.

Drivers, mechanics and drag racing fans stare at the objects they love.

The Starting Line captures the rhythms of a day at the Tijuana border crossing. But it’s not just any day: as people go through their routines, they listen to the local news report on Donald Trump’s inauguration. By taking the usual viewpoint—American broadcasters talking about life on the Mexican border—and flipping it on its head, The Starting Line presents an unexpected view of America’s capitol, as it appears from just over the border.

Drawing on over seventy-five encounters with New Yorkers of different ages, races, genders, and sexual interests, The Browsers is a portrait of The Big Apple as seen through the eyes of lovers, searching the web for their special someone.

Hundreds of refugee children in Sweden, who have fled with their families from extreme trauma, have become afflicted with 'uppgivenhetssyndrom,' or Resignation Syndrome. Facing deportation, they withdraw from the world into a coma-like state, as if frozen, for months, or even years.

A collection of shorts made by various directors in response to 9/11.

The portrait of a city: ancient yet constantly remaking itself. A poem in images: stillness, patterns, urban motion. And in words: a tofu seller, a homeless woman, a Buddhist priest, contemplating nature, the metabolism of their city, mortality. And 20,000 crows, unruly avatars of the natural world, sardonically observing it all.

EMPIRE OF THE MOON wryly deconstructs the experience of being a tourist. Paris, gorgeously photographed in black-and-white, is the setting for cultural explorations ranging from the mundane to the sublime, as visitors trek from icon to icon, snapping the same photos, climbing the same steps and at times experiencing the transformative wonder they came to find.

Hundreds of refugee children in Sweden, who have fled with their families from extreme trauma, have become afflicted with 'uppgivenhetssyndrom,' or Resignation Syndrome. Facing deportation, they withdraw from the world into a coma-like state, as if frozen, for months, or even years.

New day films

A collection of shorts made by various directors in response to 9/11.

The portrait of a city: ancient yet constantly remaking itself. A poem in images: stillness, patterns, urban motion. And in words: a tofu seller, a homeless woman, a Buddhist priest, contemplating nature, the metabolism of their city, mortality. And 20,000 crows, unruly avatars of the natural world, sardonically observing it all.

EMPIRE OF THE MOON wryly deconstructs the experience of being a tourist. Paris, gorgeously photographed in black-and-white, is the setting for cultural explorations ranging from the mundane to the sublime, as visitors trek from icon to icon, snapping the same photos, climbing the same steps and at times experiencing the transformative wonder they came to find.

"Sumo East and West" is a feature documentary about the cultural changes facing Japan as more and more foreigners enter the ancient Japanese sport of sumo wrestling.

Feature documentary about humor and the Holocaust, examining whether it is ever acceptable to use humor in connection with a tragedy of that scale, and the implications for other seemingly off-limits topics in a society that prizes free speech.

The Starting Line captures the rhythms of a day at the Tijuana border crossing. But it’s not just any day: as people go through their routines, they listen to the local news report on Donald Trump’s inauguration. By taking the usual viewpoint—American broadcasters talking about life on the Mexican border—and flipping it on its head, The Starting Line presents an unexpected view of America’s capitol, as it appears from just over the border.

Reporter Clay Pigeon interviews New Yorkers in October, 2008.

Directed by Sarah Clift.

A short film about Artists' Television Access.

'we travel with the notions and the emotions........'