John Callander
When her wild younger sister Ashley, who suffers from bipolar disorder and drug addiction, goes missing, Libba Phillips pours all her time and energy into finding Ashley and bringing her home. As the years go by, Libba refuses to give up hope, and, at the expense of her marriage and career, Libba finds her calling in life: creating a much-needed resource center for other families whose missing loved ones have fallen through the cracks.
After Ben Garvey foolishly turned back to crime, he thought his life was over when he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. But his death sentence isn't quite what it seems, as Ben regains consciousness near an eerie psychiatric ward, where he's told he's been hired as the groundskeeper. With the state of his soul in question, and the love for his wife and daughter all the more real and powerful, Ben must figure out if he's truly cheated death, or if he's become part of something far more sinister.
Mark A. Lewis's tragic-comic adventure ILL FATED plunges the viewer into the boxed-in world of Jimmy, a small-town teen who seeks a better life but who sees dead-end signs at every turn out of town. His vague plan to leave and "look into college" is complicated by a revolving door of small-town complications - the demands of his lumpen best friends, his troubled girlfriend, his promiscuous stepmother and cuckolded stepfather. But the biggest complication of all is the return of his womanizing biological dad Earl, who'd fled in Jimmy's infancy after impregnating the wife of a violent convict (also his best friend). Earl's return is a catalyst to disaster, and a palette for director Lewis to paint a hyper-realist picture of small-town dystopia.
