“If A Tree Falls” is a rare behind-the-curtain look at the Earth Liberation Front, the radical environmental group that the FBI calls America’s “number one domestic terrorist threat.” With unprecedented access and a nuanced point of view, the documentary tells the story of Daniel McGowan, an ELF member who faced life in prison for two multi-million dollar arsons against Oregon timber companies. The film employs McGowan’s story to examine larger questions about environmentalism, activism, and terrorism.

SYNOPSIS

California is sinking and death comes in the form of a stripper.

GENERAL INFO

Director:                              Frazer Bradshaw & Beth Lisick
Written by:                          Beth Lisick & Frazer Bradshaw
Producer:                            Laura Techera Francia
Executive Producer:         Stephen Bannatyne
Editor:                                 Frazer Bradshaw
Sound Designer:               Kent Sparling
Presented by:                     Lucky Hat Entertainment
Running time:                   11 min.

MAIN CAST

Beth Lisick, Tara Jepsen, Rashida Clendening, Nicole Sager, Susie Wise

Ernie Orozco is Mr. C, a Howard Cosell impersonator, with a quick-wit and an encyclopedic knowledge of sports trivia. As Mr. C, he flies across the country to emcee $2,500-a-plate fundraisers, appears on TV and radio shows, and befriends celebrities, but when Ernie takes off his wig and make-up, he is a blue collar, middle-aged dad, who must go to his soul-withering day job of fixing radios on city buses.

With humor and unexpected poignancy, “Mr. C in Heaven” captures Ernie’s attempts to launch Mr. C’s next big adventure, as he fights his own nagging doubts about his dream and whether he really is a contender.

Already bent by the demands of his home life – fatherhood, a faltering marriage, and a submerged mortgage – a tradesman struggles to balance his own appetites and expectations with those of a friend in need. “Everything Strange and New” is an intimate portrait of ordinary people longing for certainty in uncertain times.

Wayne is a carpenter, no longer young, but uneasy with the emotional complexities of adulthood. Aimless hours spent with Leo, his newly-divorced drinking buddy, offer some relief to the heavy gravity at home, where his kids run roughshod over his increasingly unstable wife. Living between these worlds leaves Wayne feeling like a character in someone else’s story. Ultimately, a violent spasm rouses him from this fevered American dream.

In his feature debut, veteran cinematographer Frazer Bradshaw infuses conventional narrative storytelling with his trademark film poetics. Stylistically, the movie owes more to European and Asian pastorals – films by Tarkovsky, Bresson, and the young Zhang Yimou – than to contemporary US cinema.

With its concise pacing and wider implications, “Everything Strange and New” considers the proposition of living life with an economy of expression.

In a not too distant future, a Plastic Bag goes on an epic journey in search of its lost Maker, wondering if there is any point to life without her. The Bag encounters strange creatures, brief love in the sky, a colony of prophetic torn bags on a fence and the unknown. To be with its own kind, the Bag goes deep under the oceans into 500 nautical miles of spinning garbage known as the North Pacific Trash Vortex. Will our Plastic Bag be able to forget its Maker there?

Filmmaker Gabriel Noble follows nine-year-old hip hop phenomenon P-Star as she prepares to move out from under the shadow of her single father/mentor and take the music industry by storm. By night, P-Star keeps the clubs rocking, and by day, she greets her fans at public appearances. Back in the day, P-Star’s dad produced such groundbreaking acts as Ice-T and 2 LIVE CREW; these days, all of his energy goes toward helping his daughter reach the top of the charts. Despite her age, P-Star is fiercely independent. She’s never stopped thinking about her mother, and after securing a record deal she begins to voice her own opinions about how to create a successful public image.

Mariana (Paola Mendoza) is determined to keep her family together. Her children, Gabriel (Sebastian Villada Lopez), 10, and Andrea (Laura Montana Cortez), 6, have grown up in Colombia without their father. He immigrated to the United States years earlier in order to make a better life for his family. Finally after many years of separation the family is reunited in New York City.

After coming home late from work one night Antonio announces he has found work in Miami and will be moving there…alone. He will send for the family when he is settled.

Days go by and Mariana does not hear from him. Worried and desperate, she goes to her only friend’s home only to find out Antonio is not coming back. The rent is due, there is no food on the table and Mariana has $50 to her name. With no one to turn to, she must find a way, in a strange city where she barely speaks the language, to provide for her family, financially and emotionally.

Mariana makes homemade empanadas (meat patties), which she tries to sell on the streets, however this quickly fails. With all options closing in on her, Mariana turns to the city’s trash, collecting cans in order to put food on the table. With Gabriel and Andrea working beside her, the family finds the most stability they have known since their arrival, and it is during these challenging moments that the family triumphs.

In “Entre Nos,” Mariana, Gabriel and Andrea take us on a remarkable journey where we bear witness to a family’s commitment to survival and their unrelenting hope for the American dream…one soda can at a time.

Is nothing American sacred anymore? The largest mall in the world turns out not to be the famous Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. It’s the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou, China. Outdoing the techniques of American consumerism, South China Mall is Disneyland, Las Vegas and Mall of America rolled into one. There are carnival rides, mini-parks, canals and lakes amid classic Western-style buildings with space for hundreds of shops.

But along with the glitz and glory of middle-class shopping, the mall’s Chinese developers seem to have imported something else — a cautionary tale of capitalist hubris. Alex Hu, a local Guangzhou boy who made it big in international business, wanted South China Mall to be a hometown monument to his success — even though Guangzhou has no major airports or highways nearby. And four years after its construction, the mall sits virtually empty of both shops and shoppers. But the Chinese have imported yet another concept familiar to Americans — South China Mall is considered too big to fail. So, employees line up for flag-raising ceremonies and pep talks about “brand building” before going off to maintain the deserted concourses meticulously. If China is the future of the world economy, “Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall” just may be a startling peek at what’s to come.

“Utopia, Part 3″ is part of the POV Shorts Program, which aired on August 18, 2009.

Souléymane, AKA Solo, a 34-year-old, Senegalese taxi driver in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is hired by William, a tough 70-year-old white southerner, to drive him in two weeks time, on October 20th, to Blowing Rock, the peak of a secluded mountain. Solo comes to understand William’s plan, and makes one of his own to befriend the stubborn 70-year-old and dissuade him from jumping off the rock before the two weeks are up.

He brings William with him on taxi rides; they visit drug dealers and bars, play pool, and flirt with barmaids. Solo even introduces William to his 9-year-old stepdaughter, smart and independent Alex, with whom William immediately forms a bond. He also meets Solo’s strong-willed Mexican wife, Quiera, who discourages Solo from pursuing his dream of becoming a flight attendant. Ultimately, Solo leaves Quiera and moves into William’s motel room. Though William tries to keep Solo at arm’s length, Solo convinces him to act as his study partner for his flight attendant test. Just days before the 20th, Solo is convinced that he has succeeded in saving William.

William also keeps a secret from his past to himself. When he closes his bank account and gives away the last of his possessions, Solo, crushed, realizes that William has not forgotten his death wish, and confronts him. William violently throws him out of their motel room. No longer William’s driver, Solo has lost everything. That’s when Solo realizes that to truly be a selfless friend to William, he must do the opposite of what he had planned: he must be the one to take his friend to his death.

And so, on October 20th, Solo drives William to the mountaintop. With them comes Alex, Solo’s last hope to save William. There on Blowing Rock, high above the brilliant autumn colors, where the wind is powerful enough to blow a man up into the sky, the drama reaches its climax.

The first Mardi Gras in America was celebrated in Mobile, Alabama in 1703. In 2007, it is still racially segregated. Filmmaker Margaret Brown (“Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt”), herself a daughter of Mobile, escorts us into the parallel hearts of the city’s two carnivals. With unprecedented access, she traces the exotic world of secret mystic societies and centuries-old traditions and pageantry; diamond-encrusted crowns, voluminous, hand-sewn gowns, surreal masks and enormous papier-mache floats. Against this opulent backdrop, she uncovers a tangled web of historical violence and power dynamics, elusive forces that keep this hallowed tradition organized along enduring color lines. Prize winner at Silverdocs, and official selection at Sundance, SXSW, Full Frame, Edinburgh and LA Film Festivals.