Here's a preview of the films being screened at the New Jersey International Film Festival: Summer 2016. The festival takes place from June 4 through June 18 in Voorhees Hall at Rutgers University (71 Hamilton Street) in New Brunswick, NJ. For more information visit www.njfilmfest.com
Saturday, June 4
Mother’s Day – Tragedy forces a mother and son to say goodbye. Starring Academy Award Winner Melissa Leo. 2016; 7 min.
Jef Needs Ice Cream - A comedic short about a guy named Jef who goes to his friend’s apartment to smoke some left-over weed, only to realize that Brad didn’t leave any ice cream behind in his fridge. 2015; 11 min.
D.L. Fitzsimmons presents: The Class Acts - The members of a vaudeville troupe decide to rebuild their show and give the limelight one last shot. 2015; 18 min.
Occupy, Texas – Having spent 7 years in New York City, fighting against Wall Street greed, a disillusioned protester goes back to his upper middle-class home in Texas, where he must repair his rift with his two teenage sisters, and with his past. 2015; 93 min.
Sunday, June 5
What Martha Said? – After seeing on Facebook that her child wasn’t invited to a birthday party, PTA president Martha decides to stir up trouble in the real world. 2016; 11 min.
Wifey Redux – In this dark comedy, based on a story by acclaimed Irish author Kevin Barry, a man becomes obsessed with chasing away his teenage daughter’s new boyfriend 2016; 22 min.
The Other Kids – The Other Kids follows six teenagers as they struggle through their final days of high school in the small, gold rush town of Sonora, CA. This unique and moving film is a hybrid mix of documentary and fiction. Impending graduation and adulthood brings each of these 17-year-olds to the edge of an emotional precipice. When safety nets prove illusory, it’s up to each of them to find a way to save themselves – and each other. 2016; 95 min.
Saturday, June 11
Chilltown, USA – This illuminating feature-length documentary highlights the thriving music scene in Jersey City, and the musicians who strive to hold onto a local sound and culture, even as their city rapidly gentrifies. 2015; 63 min. With an introduction and Q+A session with Director Elvie Mae Parian.
Nathan East: For The Record – This great music documentary takes viewers behind-the-scenes as Nathan East, one of the most influential bass players working today, recorded his long-awaited solo album that spent four weeks at #1 on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Album chart. Featuring interviews with many musicians that he has jammed with like Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock, and Don Was. 2015; 95 min.
Sunday, June 12
A is for Aye-Aye: An Abecedarian Adventure –Iris, a curious, precocious and somewhat jaded nine-year-old New Yorker, is on a quest to find a space to exercise her imagination in the real world. The NY Public Library’s Picture Collection takes her and the audience on a transformative, animated journey. 2016; 14 min.
Kurdistan-Kurdistan – Delil Dilanar, a singer of traditional Kurdish songs, has continued to keep alive a rich and complex musical style known as dengbej. However, after 20 years of exile in Europe, he finds that his heart hasn’t followed him. During a concert in New York, he announces his return to his roots. Once he finds himself back in Kurdistan, he falls into a deep depression, and he must turn to his old music master to find his way forward. In Kurdish, subtitled. 98 min. 2015.
Friday, June 17
Flesh – An existential film about a battered woman turned sociopath. Belle becomes a wicked puppet master who pulls the strings of everyone around her, manipulating them into executing a twisted and vengeful plot of deception. 2016; 15 min. With an introduction and Q+A session with Director Kather Sei.
They Will All Die in Space – A beautifully shot and suspenseful futuristic tale. When a young astronaut wakes up from a cryogenic sleep in a virtually-abandoned spaceship, he grows suspicious about the intentions of the two remaining fellow astronauts. With a pulsating score keeping the film’s tension high, this film will suck you in and hold on to you until the end. 2015; 14 min.
Chrysalis – The year is 2144. Instead of growing older, every person is going through a process of genetic transformation known as Chrysalis. A million genes. A million possibilities. But for Tristan Winters, a spy in the Imaginat Division of Global Security, each new genetic cycle is a chance to develop a mutation of Monamine Oxidase, or... the psychopath gene. 2015; 19 min.
Sunday, June 17
Post-Panoptic Gazing – You will dance unlike you have ever danced before, with threads of everything you know, repackaged in metastatic digital packets of data rapidly going nowhere, blinking quickly into things outside the periphery of consciousness and knowledge, towards digital sickness that thirsts for absolution. Ignore the rabid gnashing of your teeth. Better to grin and bear it, and accept the perpetual post-Panoptic suspension. 2016; 12 min.
Psychedelia – This documentary thoughtfully chronicles the use of mind-altering drugs, and their ability to induce mystical, or religious, experiences, in controlled psychotherapy studies that took place prior to the counterculture of the 1960s. Blending archival footage, artistic images, and interviews with leading experts in the field of psychedelic research, reveals a fascinating and little-known history, that culminates with stories from participants in current research studies, whose experiences have transformed the way that they look at their inner lives and the outside world. 2015; 60 min. With an introduction and Q+A session with Director Pat Murphy.
Saturday, June 18
The Suitor – A thrilling romance set during the night that Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds in 1938, and announced that Martians had landed in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, causing mass panic. 2016; 12 min.
Twinsburg – Jerry, sentimental about his fading twin identity, reunites with his reluctant brother Paul for a weekend of revelry at the world’s largest congregation of twins. 2016; 16 min.
Roubado – This short tells the story of an introverted Afro-Portuguese teen growing up in the south of France. As he suffers his parents’ recent breakup, the only solace he can muster is his penchant for photography. When his mother’s new live-in boyfriend crosses the line, his eyes are opened to the world and he can no longer hide behind the viewfinder of his vintage camera. In French and Portuguese, subtitled. 2015; 18 min.
Saturday, June 18
Mai (Never) – When Claudia decides to travel to a small town in Sicily to get back together with her ex-girlfriend, she finds herself abandoned in a town she doesn’t know. Wandering around town, she meets Sandro, who questions all of her beliefs. In Italian, 2015; 20 min.
H.O.M.E. – A meditation on urban communication, alienation, and serendipitous encounters told through the lens of a disconnected city in constant motion. Two stories play out in parallel to one another: the first concerns a missing young man with Asperger’s Syndrome who seeks refuge in the labyrinthine subway tunnels of New York City. The other follows an Ecuadorian driver who offers a ride to a stranded Chinese woman desperate to get home to her sick child. find a home. In Spanish and English, subtitled. 2016; 72 min.
