An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

The Given

Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s first feature as co-directors, Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting extreme poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of far more controlling powers.

Empty Metal

End of Life is the product of four years spent by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik with five individuals at various stages in the process of dying. The filmmakers trained to be end-of-life doulas and documented hundreds of hours of interactions with their subjects.

End of Life

From a snake charmer to a welder, from a weaver to an obstetrician, the inhabitants of the holy city of Varanasi are striving for survival, and transform and ennoble themselves in the process. A hypnotic study of people at work—a street beggar, a surgeon, a weaver, a priest, a masseur, a tabla drum maker, and a crane operator: people who in their intense concentration and ritualized movements evoke the idea of human labor as an act of spiritual devotion and social interdependence. Filmed largely in India’s ancient holy city of Varanasi