Jacksonville Film Festival 2009

Three years in the making, this cinema-verite feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berliners (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet. An inside look at the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy , the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking as it examines a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

The Day After Peace charts the remarkable 10-year journey taken by award winning filmmaker Jeremy Gilley to establish a day of Peace on September 21st. During the course of his mission the camera follows Gilley as he galvanizes the countries of the world to recognize this as an official day of ceasefire and non-violence.After the official motion is unanimously adopted in the UN, Gilley turns his efforts to implementing the ideals of Peace Day around the world. Celebrity support from the likes of Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller and corporate support from Puma, Coca-Cola, Ben & Jerry’s and Ecover enhances the momentum.Jeremy’s persistence is rewarded when UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and local affected communities decide to try and use the Day to carry out a mass vaccination against Polio, in one of the toughest conflict areas in the world, Afghanistan.Jeremy asks Jude Law to accompany him to Afghanistan, to help persuade the government and insurgents to ratify Peace Day. The task seems impossible, but pure human spirit in a country exhausted with conflict, may just win through.

Directed by St. Augustine’s own James Bolton, Dream Boy is an independent coming-of-age story about Nathan, a shy and awkward teenager who has moved to a small town in Louisiana with his father Harland and mother Vivian. Nathan is attracted to other boys, but has had a hard time coming to terms with his sexuality after years of being abused by his father. Living next door is Roy, who attends the same high school. Nathan is infatuated with Roy, and one day while doing homework together he discovers Roy is also interested in him. On a camping trip with school friends, the other boys wander why Nathan and Roy insist on sharing a tent, raising the question of their sexuality.

Based on a true story, the yacht Royal Flush sinks 500 miles from land, forcing Thomas Dudley and crew to abandon into their life raft. Here they will spend the next 24 days, where they must survive with little food and water. They are at the mercy of the ocean, and and on day 3 they run out of rations. Fear and boredom set in, but the will to survive pushes them to their limits, each wondering what their fate is to be. After 19 days they have not eaten in nearly a week and another storm has just about finished them off. On this evening, in a sercret meeting, Dudley and Stephens know that one of them is going to have to die if any of them are to survive.

Even in My Dreams is a variant of the ‘coming-of-age genre,’ but it otherwise departs dramatically from the conventional. In this sparely drawn psycho-drama the protagonist is anything but the usual confused teenager prone to alternating fits of sexual excitement and histrionics in dealing with the first sparks of sexual awakening. Michael, an elderly, world-worn widower, in his pattern of mundane daily urban meanderings, happens upon a Tom of Finland doll in a sex shop display window. His bemused subconscious fascinationwith the erotic doll is the trigger for a belated and reluctant sexual self-discovery at the end of a lifetime of sexual repression.  A series of dreams and stream-of-consciousness vignettes moves Michael from surprise to hope to love affair ending in violence and betrayal. New York University – New York Best of USA Student Shorts

“Conventional medicine is the leading cause of death in the United States”-Peer-reviewed study by the Nutrition Institute of America. More and more people are rejecting their doctor’s advice, pharmaceutical drugs, hospitalization, and surgery. They simply don’t trust the system anymore and realize that the profit motive, the merchandising of medical services, and the unwillingness of most doctors to open their minds when it conflicts with what they already believe are now informing too many disastrous medical decisions. These progressive patients are taking control of their health and looking for their own cures.Award-winning BBC filmmaker Len Richmond interviews survivors of cancer, AIDS, and other serious life-threatening illnesses who, after being given a death sentence by conventional doctors, went on to heal themselves solely with natural means (herbs, diet, etc). Len also speaks to renegade medical doctors, Ayurvedic healers, and Chinese herbalists who firmly believe that there is another way, a better way.“Everything Bad is Good”, is an entertaining, witty one-hour documentary that captures an exciting new movement that’s transforming the way people think about their health and mortality. This film may save your life.Certain to be attacked by the medical establishment and pharmaceutical interests, “Everything Bad is Good” is a daring work of art and revolution.

In this Black and White satire and homage to early talkie film, the character 'B' doesn't have much more than her one-letter name - a fire burned it all, including her birth certificate. All the girls at school have great clothes, fancy hair and long names. And what's more, they have guys to stalk them, and they take pride in this adoration from these strange suitors. Pining for a stalker herself and feeling outcast, B runs away into the woods, only to come face to face with a stalker of her very own.

Chaturanga is the story of a love that is caught between conflicting worlds of ideas. The lead protagonist Sachish fleets from radical positivism to religious mysticism in his quest for life's meaning. However, his search ultimately yields nothing but crushing disillusionment. This is because he cannot square his abstract ideals with the powerful presences of two women in his life. One of them is Damini, a young Hindu widow, and the other is Nanibala, the abandoned mistress of Sachish's own brother. Sachish tries to convince himself that Nanibala is simply a helpless woman who needs to be 'rescued' by him. Similarly, during his later religious phase, he pretends that the widow Damini is merely an enticement of Nature that must be avoided at all costs for spiritual salvation. Chaturanga thus becomes, after a point, a psychodrama of unbelievable cruelty. Nanibala becomes a victim of it because as a 'fallen woman' she can only be 'saved', but her humanity cannot be recognized. Damini is first given away by her dying husband, along with all her property, to a religious guru. She then falls in love with Sachish who can accept her only without her sexuality. Set in Colonial Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century, the film weaves a rich tapestry of crisscrossing desires and moralities.Based on the novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Rabindranath Tagore, Chaturanga is directed by Suman Mukhopadhyay, one of the most exciting and promising young filmmakers working in India at present.Chaturanga, based on the book by Rabindranath Tagore, is Suman Mukhopadhyay's second feature film. In 2005, Suman completed his first feature film, Herbert, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya. The film was given the National Award for Best Regional Film. He has also been conferred with awards like the Most Promising Director (BFJA), Best Debut Director (Lankesh Award) and Audience Award in the Dhaka International Film Festival. Herbert has been screened in a number of national and international film festivals including Cannes, Florence, Bangkok, Osian Cinefan, Zanzibar, Mumbai, Pune and Kerala. Suman has done his film training from the New York Film Academy, USA. He is currently scripting 'The Hungry Tide,' based on the novel by Amitav Ghosh.Suman is also one of the best young theater directors working in India at present, having done productions ranging from European drama to major adaptations of Bengali masterpieces.Chaturanga is of course a drama. It is a melodrama in the good sense of the term. In other words, melos or music in this film creates a soundscape to accompany the drama of human relations. Music expresses longings and desires that are either repressed or culturally and politically forbidden. Chaturanga deals with questions, which are contemporary and timeless. It interrogates our perception of the human evolution. Chaturanga does not provide a single reference to the contemporary political situation. Perhaps Rabindranath was trying to address deeper concerns regarding human ethos and codes of our existence. In the film, protagonist Sachish metamorphoses from a staunch rationalist to a devout spiritualist.Nonetheless, there is an immense reversal in Sachish's viewpoint at the end of the film. We, as social beings, have tried to solve all our moral, social and political dilemmas in accordance to the model of diametric opposites. East-West, Left-Right, Normal-Abnormal, Discipline-Punish for example. Rabindranath himself, at one point of time, was a victim of the similar ideological closures. Nevertheless, Rabindranath undertook many journeys in his life, journeys that allowed him to transcend his previous position.We have shamefully observed the disasters of experimentations with human beings. In our archeology of knowledge, we have seen the quest of human mind to attain an order through religion or benevolence or coercion or moderation or collectivism. We are yet to reach any durable 'resolution.' Nevertheless, any attempt to harness the spirit of human nature, any effort to negate the undefined areas of our inner world only reveals the holes in the ideological models. Therefore, Chaturanga proposes an unending journey, timeless quest.