Michael Almereyda
Lee and Mae are a couple trying to work out their differences. As Mae struggles with memories of a former flame, Lee, who is a writer, works through his frustration by forming his problems into a story in his mind. And that's when everything starts shifting back and forth from reality to Lee's imagination.
The writings and movie memories of renowned poet John Ashbery are refracted in a kaleidoscope of film clips that open up an illuminating dialogue between his work and cinema
Almereyda’s reading of Kenneth Koch’s “To the Unknown” transforms footage of the everyday into a moving tribute to one of the New York School’s most treasured and inventive poets. - NYFF
Escapes blazes a path through mid-20th-century Hollywood via the experiences of Hampton Fancher – flamenco dancer, actor, and the unlikely producer and screenwriter of the landmark sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Fancher recounts episodes from his life — romantic misadventures with silver-screen stars, wayward acts of chivalry, jealousy, and friendship — matched with a parallel world of film and TV footage wherein Fancher plays cowboys, killers, fops, cads, and the occasional hero. Escapes shows how one man’s personal journey can unexpectedly shape a medium’s future.
A service which creates holographic projections of late family members allows an elderly woman to spend time with a younger version of her deceased husband.
Interview with director Wim Wenders conducted and edited by filmmaker Michael Almereyda. Included with The Road Trilogy.
Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram designs a psychology experiment that still resonates to this day, in which people think they’re delivering painful electric shocks to an affable stranger strapped into a chair in another room. Despite his pleads for mercy, the majority of subjects don’t stop the experiment, administering what they think is a near-fatal electric shock, simply because they’ve been told to do so. With Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community with his exploration into people’s tendency to comply with authority. Celebrated in some circles, he is also accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster, but his wife Sasha stands by him through it all.
A photographer shares unpublished images chronicling time spent among the 'fiercely independent' residents of a remote English fishing village.
In this retelling of an Italian folktale, a man marries the youngest of three sisters and shares a very strange secret with her on their wedding night.
A young man sets out on a journey to the Ogre's lair, in search of a feather with the power to save a dying king.
The Fitzgerald classic as you've never seen it, transposed to a Los Angeles of sleek modern architecture and strip-mall foot clinics.
Paradise has been compared to a notebook, a diary and a sketchbook. It is a collection of discrete moments, unscripted and unstaged, shot digitally over several years, none lasting longer than four minutes. There is no voiceover or onscreen text to link or explain the fragments. These moments have little in common other than that they are all instants of beauty or happiness. While there is footage from nine different countries, the final section is centered on the US. There is little direct reference to 9/11 and the wars that followed, but those events – as Almeryeda puts it – “cast a shadow over the film.” If there is perhaps the faintest strain of melancholy in the film, it is because the film can’t help but point out that, unlike Paradise, these moments don’t last.
One year after Hurricane Katrina, troubles arise for a surgeon who, despite remarrying his ex-wife and starting his life anew, becomes reacquainted with an former girlfriend.
Documentary about William Eggleston, a famous modern American photographer.
André Breton, the great leader of the surrealist revolution, is still alive and he is in New York! Filmed with Almereyda's favourite Pixelvision camera (a children's camera that became popular among experimental film makers), the master demonstrates his power over dream and unconscious. A hypnotised cowboy predicts the war speech of Bush. Outside, a child blows bubbles.
Director Michael Almereyda's documentary on the weeks just prior to Sam Shepard's stage production of his play "The Late Henry Moss."
When her sister suddenly vanishes, a young girl sets out to find her, desperately searching the internet for clues. Joining her is an ex-CIA agent, who uncovers fragments of online chats the missing girl had with a softcore pornographer.
An alcoholic American couple travel to the UK with their son so he can meet his grandmother but they walk in on their crazed uncle who is in the midst of reviving a centuries-old Druid witch.
A gambler comes to live with his sister and discovers his young nephew can predict the winner of horse races by riding on his rocking horse.
Michael Almereyda discussing the future of film with various directors at Sundance.
This ultra-hip, post-modern vampire tale is set in contemporary New York City. Members of a dysfunctional family of vampires are trying to come to terms with each other, in the wake of their father's death. Meanwhile, they are being hunted by Dr. Van Helsing and his hapless nephew. As in all good vampire movies, forces of love are pitted against forces of destruction.
Men and women search for intimacy and meaning in their lives. Shot on a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera.
Until The End of the World is an odyssey for the modern age. As with Homer's Odyssey, the purpose of the journey is to restore sight -- a spiritual reconciliation between an obsessed father and a deserted son. Dr. Farber, in trying to find a cure for his wife's blindness, has created a device that allows the user to send images directly to the brain, enabling the blind to see.
An oddball family on a Kansas farm are trapped in their farmhouse by an impending storm. The patriarch of the clan is a retired soda pop tycoon. He is currently dating a children's TV evangelist. Also living at the farm is his layabout daughter and her precocious 8 year old daughter, his would-be artist son, the son's fiancée, and the black maid. Also thrown into the mix is the daughter's ex-husband, a ne-er-do-well who is seeking to get back in his ex-wife's good graces.
When successful businessman Sam Treadwell finds that his android wife, Cherry model 2000 has blown a fuse, he hires sexy renegade tracker E. Johnson to find her exact duplicate. But as their journey to replace his perfect mate leads them into the treacherous and lawless region of 'The Zone', Treadwell learns the hard way that the perfect woman is made not of computer chips and diodes.
Loosely based on a section of Mikhail Lermontov's classic Russian novel of the same title, the film involves a displaced cowboy (played by Kevin Jarre, the screenwriter of Rambo), a sociopathic record producer (Dennis Hopper) and, caught between them, a gum-chewing valley girl who would rather be somewhere else (Natalie Zimmerman). Lermontov's 19th century novel leaves a vapor trail on the action, but A Hero of Our Time is more precisely a portrait of contemporary Los Angeles, a tale of wayward heroism played out against a landscape of yearning and desolation. Director/writer Michael Almereyda, whose screenplay for Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World will be produced this year, completed principal photography for A Hero of Our Time in October of 1985. Dennis Hopper's participation occurred during a break in the filming of Blue Velvet.
In 1967, strait-laced exploitation movie king Roger Corman embarks on a life-changing attempt to capture the psychedelic world of LSD on film by taking a "trip" himself, abetted by Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
