Secret Room

This is the first in Lily Baldwin's Paperback Movie Project. Each short film is an interpretation of a novel and explores the fluid relationship between a reader and the characters she is reading. What happens if you you fall into your book? A JUICE BOX AFTERNOON is a romantic and violent dream filled with stylized dance and pop-mash-up lullabies, that tells the story of Anne Morrow Lindbergh through her own writing as she comes of age, meets Charles Lindbergh, and experiences flight in more ways than one.

Seen through the voyeurism of glass pane, this is the story of 1960's coiffed etiquette gone awry. Dancing bodies reveal a meaty subtext as all protocol gets unhinged.

An innocent tourist travels to LA and unexpectedly conjures her sister's last night alive. Bold score, stylized dance and an eccentric cast, shot at The Standard Hotel, weave a dark and luminous film that revamps traditional narrative.

A young woman stumbles upon a seemingly empty estate. Hesitantly she enters and wanders its chilling insides: a Pandora's Box that entices and haunts her with a series of stylized dance tableaux. History reveals itself in these poignant flashes. She is in fact a ghost in her own home. Through a visceral, visually striking sequence of events, Sea Meadow revamps the thriller genre using dance, gesture and pop-music mashups to investigate the themes of identity, mortality and memory.

Sam, newly a mother, shops at a supermarket with her baby and husband Carlson. She throws a neighborhood shishkabob party in her den. Her family shares a Sunday breakfast. But through her smiles and picturesque tasks, there's a suppression. Sam’s grown something she can no longer contain. As she purges this parasite, we move inside her body and experience this wildness as a feverish dance.The parasite ejects us back into the kitchen of another woman, alone eating breakfast as she looks at a happy couple pictured on the back of her cereal box. It’s Sam and Carlson. What's beneath a picture? A dream within a dream. Horror meets dance, SWALLOWED suggests a complex truth to motherhood and domesticity. (The Criterion Channel)

Sleeping With Frank shows a slice of a morning in Queens, NY. A couple readies for the day. Wake-up, get dressed, eat breakfast. The tableaux are familiar: cozy, rote, intimate and distant. Dance and choreographed gestures reveal a potent underbelly to the lacquer of such domestic normalcy

This docu-dream is a story without words using the language of movement. Through a vivid and surreal landscape, each person encounters a series of distinct individuals and slowly rediscovers a larger collective body. Terrain is a dancing unison of difference. Our bodies bridge gaps between worlds, and with this we invent a new kind of non-verbal truth. This new interconnectedness propels us back to life again, essentialized by our shared sense of interbeing.

A love that transports through time and place. Inspired by iconic NYC love scenes from the 1970's, and an ode to Maya Deren's MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON. This meticulous craft of cutting-on-action proposes a dance as if it were literally occurring in front of you, like a live performance.

In an old school dance studio on the Hudson River where Merce Cunningham and John Cage lived for years, one gesture is explored in varying speeds: removal.

A man and his grandmother hide out from an ominous broadcast. The Grim Reaper hosts a TV show. The formerly incarcerated recount and reinterpret their first days of freedom. A suburban mom's life is upturned by the beast growing inside of her. And a high school gym teacher runs drills from inside a volcano. What happens when five of independent film's most adventurous filmmakers join together to literally adapt each other’s dreams for the screen?