The Sixth Year
The Sixth Year is an art world drama series in five episodes, which re-interprets the format of the TV series. Set in the New York art world, it stages the backstage and theatricalizes the social interactions and power games, the aspirations, passions, and everyday realities of the field. The screenplay is based on interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, collectors, and art advisors, whose opinions, anecdotes, and gossip it abstracts and extrapolates into a fictional narrative.
Dustin Guy Defa
Alex Ross Perry
Rick Alverson
Loretta Fahrenholz
Nick Mauss
Ken Okiishi
Casts & Crew
Kentucker Audley
Anna Bak-Kvapil
Dustin Guy Defa
Keith Poulson
Bob Hennessey
Bob Hennessey
Hannah Gross
Also Directed by Dustin Guy Defa
A dizzy trip through the mid-1990s with a dysfunctional American family. Reliving a distracted child's birthday party, an emotionless wedding, a Halloween in a garage and a Christmas marked with alcohol, drugs and perversion, the film is a crumpled letter from a filmmaker to his family: a shattered kaleidoscope of the destructive patterns that have trapped and wounded its members.
Follows a variety of New York characters as they navigate personal relationships and unexpected problems over the course of one day.
Waking up the morning after hosting a party, a man discovers a stranger passed out on his floor. He spends the rest of the day trying to convince her to leave.
In the wake of Shepard Fairey’s arrest for vandalism, Dustin Guy Defa explores graffiti and street art in contemporary Detroit. What is vandalism? And how will the city define itself going forward?
A young woman invites a vagabond to stay the night at her house but her feelings of insecurity threaten to overshadow the visit.
A humorless loner attempts to win the admiration of a drifter with his debut performance at the local comedy club.
A woman is confronted by a stranger, who believes she’s been edited out of their story.
Dan Sallitt in conversation with Jaime N. Christley about Red River
Scenes from the working life of a male director: Defa sophisticatedly lampoons masculinity in filmmaking with this sly, surprising meta-movie. (Courtesy of Film Society of Lincoln Center.)
A young woman recounts a story to a group of friends who listen with rapt attention, but the tale sounds very familiar… Another masterful and clever work by one of the world’s premier shorts filmmakers.
Also Directed by Alex Ross Perry
An author whose books sell OK and have a literary vibe to them. They don’t sell nearly as well as grisly crime thrillers he writes under an alter ego. Once his pseudonym is exposed, the author and his wife decide to give the other author a ceremonial burial. And then the people who were involved in doing that start turning up dead as it appears the alter ago has taken on a life of his own.
An American risk analyst becomes obsessed with a mysterious language cult seemingly behind a string of unexplained murders in Greece and the Middle East. Obsessed by this ritualistic violence, he searches for an explanation. A journey that begins to take over his life and the lives of those closest to him.
Two women retreat to a lake house to get a break from the pressures of the outside world, only to realize how disconnected from each other they have become, allowing their suspicions to bleed into reality.
Anger rages in Philip as he awaits the publication of his second novel. He feels pushed out of his adopted home city by the constant crowds and noise, a deteriorating relationship with his photographer girlfriend Ashley, and his own indifference to promoting the novel. When Philip's idol Ike Zimmerman offers his isolated summer home as a refuge, he finally gets the peace and quiet to focus on his favorite subject: himself.
A self-destructive punk rocker struggles with sobriety while trying to recapture the creative inspiration that led her band to success.
A mockumentary detailing the history of the Swedish rock band Ghost.
JR has broken up with her professor. She enlists her nervous and obnoxious younger brother Colin to take a short road trip in order to help move out her belongings. They bicker and fight, with one another and pretty much anybody they encounter, before being brought to a place of togetherness and understanding as a result of being pushed away by everybody in their lives except one another.
An intersectional narrative of two families in Brooklyn and the unraveling of unspoken unhappiness that occurs when a young foreign girl spending time abroad upsets the balance on both sides.
A propulsive cat and mouse thriller that follows the twisted journey of two women after a fateful encounter at a highway rest stop
Impolex tells the story of Tyrone S., a United States soldier in Operation Paperclip, the mission to locate and retrieve German rockets and rocket science after the end of World War II. Tyrone is tasked with finding what he believes are the last V-2’s. Lost in the woods of an undefined European country, people from Tyrone’s past begin to appear in unusual ways, bearing strange tidings. A loved one he abandoned for the war is especially prominent in Tyrone’s journey, as is a fellow soldier and a mysterious man with tidings of the present and the future that are not yet known to Tyrone.
Also Directed by Rick Alverson
Having set out from coastal Queens to the Catskills, an Irish immigrant carpenter finds himself overcome by an inexplicable fatigue.
A ghostly voice sings about transience while the camera glides past closed curtains, capturing the expressive, lived-in face of a dozing Val Kilmer. Rick Alverson’s disconcerting stroboscopic video editing makes the dozing body twitch. The inner turmoil of a troubled soul and restless memories rise to the surface.
1950s America. Since his mother‘s confinement to an institution, Andy has lived in the shadow of his stoic father. A family acquaintance, Dr. Wallace Fiennes, employs the introverted young man as a photographer to document an asylum tour advocating for his increasingly controversial lobotomy procedure.
Set in the Mojave Desert, the film follows a broken-down comedian playing clubs across the Southwest, working his way to Los Angeles to meet his estranged daughter.
Indifferent to the notion of inheriting his father's estate, a restless, aging New Yorker passes time with his friends in games of mock sincerity, irreverence, and recreational cruelty towards those around them.
A short documentary portrait of the artist William Eggleston; focusing particularly on his musical endeavours and his album Musik that was released through Secretly Canadian in 2017.
Returning from Afghanistan, Sean is befriended by lke, a strong willed evangelical who endeavors to ensure the fragile Sean's salvation.
Ostensibly a music video for Oneohtrix Point Never’s "Animals," more pointedly a sad, subversive meditation on aging and fame.
Two of the most distinctive voices in filmmaking are teaming for a new venture. It will be a film about an American cultural irrelevance that Americans are incapable of seeing, lost in their romantic hall of mirrors, set in Amazonia.
Also Directed by Loretta Fahrenholz
Employs partly scripted and partly improvised actions, loose choreographies, musical scores, and acts of self-reflection that all coexist in a chaotic structure.
Sketch Artist is a haunted car ride. Kim Gordon drives as “UnterPool” summons passengers throughout nighttime LA. The city drifts by, passengers intermingle in the back seat, and Gordon’s deadly stare shocks pedestrians along her route.
Earthquake contemplates mass surveillance in the modern age with legendary musician Kim Gordon in a music video for her debut solo album No Home Record. Earthquake was shot from the eye of a surveillance camera, which gradually devours the exterior world and ejects a pixelated palette of digital shapes, graphical measurements, and heat signatures onto the screen.
Shot in the East New York section of Brooklyn around the time of Hurricane Sandy, Ditch Plains is a dystopian sci-fi street dance film featuring members of Ringmasters Crew.
Also Directed by Ken Okiishi
Ken Okiishi’s most recent moving-image work is an engrossing take on the studio portrait. In tasking his real-life fitness coach with restaging social media photographs in reverse order—an embodiment of the social feed, half archive, half look book—the artist plays with notions of identity at the center of contemporary visual culture.