Rob Nilsson

A ten-year drought brings local ranches to the brink of disaster. The search for Bert Neville takes its toll on Rail and Mitra. They break up and Rail continues on alone. Travis, Ziggy and Karin hitchhike in high country and get lost in a burnt out forest. Taylor travels with Ukrainian gallery owners looking for the prototypical western artist. Dane introduces Rail to his mother, Violet, a full blood hewise, who remembers the horrors of the Indian schools. Her ex-husband Bedford refuses to give his real name to a white man. Her daughter April broadcasts a tribal blog on indian affairs. Dane and Rail are stopped by local militia types. Entrepreneurs propose a geothermal plant to ranchers and locals divided by political views. Rail finds an old map in an abandoned ranch and Mitra, now recovered, rejoins him. Is the mystery of Bert Neville about to be solved?

Center Divide is the second film in Rob Nilsson's multi-character Nomad Trilogy. In the first film, Arid Cut (2019), our refugees of the American Dream leave the city. In Center Divide, with no more West to escape to, they're now on the road heading East.

Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.

Don tries to solve a beautiful young woman's problems.

Go Together chronicles the sinking fortunes of an Oakland art cinema. Michelle, co- owner with her husband Denny, wants to continue programming the high minded films she believes in while her husband flirts with the idea of a highly profitable “vintage porn” night promoted by St. Tre, owner of a strip club and escort service. Meantime, St. Tre’s boy friend Ben Malafide aka Aldo Modisco, on parole from prison, begins to think that life in prison is preferable to the illusory “freedoms” of life in society.

Ben Malafide has been in prison for 20 years. His nerves are shot, his feelings shriveled. St. Tre, who runs an escort service and a strip club has taken him in. Ben feels he has nothing to offer her. She feels kinship as a fellow outsider, and loves him as a twin, a lost soul. But St. Tre has a weakness. She is a card player, and has amassed large gambling debts, mostly to Kenny Nordstrom who manages Schumacher’s gambling clubs in Northern California. Kenny is secretly in love with St. Tre but, afraid to show it, he keeps everything on a business level.

A diverse group of people at a gala art gallery opening are confined to the gallery when tornadoes hit. Dramatic interactions are heightened by infidelity discovered, artistic vision corrupted, greed, and commercial banditry. Questions of what art is and how it is important to a community are explored.

Berkeley is the story of Ben Sweet, an eighteen year old boy who comes to UC Berkeley in 1968 to study accounting and avoid the draft. There begins an odyssey through sex, drugs, rock and roll, and political activism which turns his world upside down and leaves him on a path of exploration and self-discovery, far from the life of his father, Sy Sweet.

The tenants of a college dormitory regress into paranoia after a violent and seemingly random murder takes place just outside their window. A story based on actual events, the film is a stunning rendition of the nature of fear and insecurity among students in a newly dangerous environment; the university campus.

Petite struggles to hold onto her relationship with Tyrone, a pool hustler, while Jane works as a stripper in the Gold Club. Lou, Jane’s mother and a heroin addict, is a renegade aging prostitute who works the streets and bars in defiance of the pimps. Francesca manages an escort service and does phone sex.

A young Jordanian woman from a small town outside Amman seeks greater personal and cultural freedom from a traditional family wants to attend a youth conference in Petra.

Ben Malafide gets out of prison after 20 years and arrives in San Francisco by ferryboat. The Information Age assails him like a hive of angry bees. Noises, images, illusory hopes and unkept promises. Time itself seems to run forward and backward as Ben looks for the basics… a meal, a kind word, a bed for the night.

Bid is a self-styled urban commando determined to live outside the system and the law. A hustler in high end auto parts, he is homeless by choice. All his gear in a storage locker, he plies the city on a motorcycle, counting coup on the cops. Yve is Bid’s girl friend, bi-sexual, ambitious but without direction. Neither wants to compromise… but their friendship is about to go tragic.

Estranged from his longtime girlfriend, suburban accountant Perry wanders into the Tenderloin at night and is drawn into a series of dangerous and erotic encounters.

A resident (Ryuki "Duke" Tenmaya) of a small Japanese island dreams of leaving his wife, heading to Tokyo and pursuing an acting career.

Phil Berkowitz, a 55 year old North Beach poet and survivor of the days of wine and roses, has a stroke. Helpless, he lies in his flea bag hotel room in San Francisco’s Tenderloin until he is found by Johnny, his next door neighbor.

In a futuristic desert hamlet, a ruthless town boss lynches a falsely accused Native American teen, setting the stage for revolt and a clash with a troubled, drunken sheriff.

Jess Koster is a young attorney in LA who is being stalked by the serial killer she is prosecuting.

A unique film about pool.. Hustler vs newbie and interesting visuals. Very "90's"

This film project was made in 1996 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cinema.

An 80-minute documentary film following John Cale and Brian Eno in Moscow, London, and Wales during the creation of the album "Words for the Dying".

Anna Reringer leaves her husband and goes to San Francisco to fulfill her dream of becoming an actress.

Marty and Speed are middle-aged San Francisco cabbies who hack to support their fading dream of making it as professional actors. Perpetually down on their luck, the friends find escape and camaraderie among their fellow drivers, playing cards and telling stories of backseat conquests, until one night when a dreaded "Signal 7" (driver's call for help) comes over the wire.

In one final attempt to achieve victory, an aging professional runner is training vigorously for a very tough marathon race.

The second part of John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's Prairie Trilogy

The bitter-sweet story of young lovers caught up in a political struggle waged by farmers against the grain trade, the banks, and the railroads. Set in North Dakota during 1915-16, a largely forgotten era of American history.

The first short film in John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's "Prairie Trilogy"

"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice, Luz and Ken are star-crossed lovers in screenwriter Sal's script, until their desire takes shape, inscribing itself into a movie of their own design. Risking his sanity to save the screenplay, Sal struggles to regain control of his characters and satisfy the demands of his producer Lester (legendary Velvet Underground founder John Cale), driving a wedge between the lovers with a desperate attempt to seduce Luz.