Dustin Guy Defa
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.
Independent Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi is trying to make a television show. He persuades BRIC TV, a Brooklyn non-profit Arts organization, to finance a television show whose premise is that every episode will be about the making of the previous episode. In the process of creating the show, everything can-and does-go wrong. The cast, a who's who of Brooklyn's independent filmmaking community, includes Alex Karpovsky, Eleonore Hendricks, Dustin Defa, and Onur Tukel.
Follows a variety of New York characters as they navigate personal relationships and unexpected problems over the course of one day.
Camila, a young Argentine theater director, travels from Buenos Aires to New York to attend an artistic residency to develop a Spanish translation of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Upon her arrival, she begins to receive a series of mysterious postcards which set her down a winding path through her past and towards her future.
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.)
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.
Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.
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?
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.
Lousy lover and egocentric Eric Sparrow is dumped by his girlfriend after rejecting her marital proposal. After a few failed dates his luck turns when a chance encounter with a vampire turns him into a sex god.
Between surrealism, unusual characters, art and magic tricks, "Swim Little Fish Swim" is a dreamlike journey from childhood to adulthood.
Left reeling by his latest catastrophic breakup, Dylan retreats to Minnesota for a family reunion featuring firearms, heavy metal and unwelcome questions. Amongst the throng of relatives, he discovers Sarah, the childhood crush he hasn't seen since her family decamped to a religious compound. Could she prove to be the perpetually heartbroken Dylan's salvation or will their emotional scars fail to align?
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.
A young woman invites a vagabond to stay the night at her house but her feelings of insecurity threaten to overshadow the visit.
Writer/director/star Alex Karpovsky, a familiar face to indie filmgoers, reveals his sterling comic chops in this close-to-the-bone comedy. Teasing the line between fiction and reality, he plays an indie filmmaker named Alex Karpovsky who, dumped by a longtime girlfriend fed up with his refusal to marry, takes to the road with a reluctant old pal for a misbegotten mini tour screening his movie on college campuses and independent cinemas.
A relationship drama set amid a winter van trip from New York to New Orleans. A loose continuation of the 2010 film.
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.
