2003

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One week every year, a virtual city is erected on the surface of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada: Black Rock City, population 29,000, otherwise known as Burning Man. Un Su Lee and Paul Barnett's Confessions of a Burning Man offers an original and intimate, yet widely appealing, view of the Burning Man event as seen through the eyes of four of our contemporaries. Samantha Weaver, clearly in her element, builds a labyrinth as a means to find her place and create her communal identity.

Season:
2003
Premiere status:
Sneak Premiere
Director:
Un Su Lee, Paul Barnett
Cinematography:
Jeffrey Chu, Un Su Lee
Editor:
Robbie Proctor
Producer:
Un Su Lee, Paul Barnett, Lily Ng, Curt Dowdy

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Alone in a room, in the still of night, an old scribbler begins work on a simple story.

Season:
2003
Director:
Kazuo Ohno

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How can a man commit petty crimes, elude the police of several states, and still get top honors at Princeton? How does such a man become a track star almost overnight without a single person knowing his crimes? And most important-why did he do it? Con Man is the story of James Hogue, an incredibly intelligent serial imposter who reinvented his identity repeatedly, always with an intriguing and fabricated past. Poised for stunning success at Princeton: he'd not only been admitted, but he attained a scholarship, top honors, and became a track star for the university.

Season:
2003
Director:
Jesse Moss
Cinematography:
Elia Lyssy, Tony Hardmon, Frank DeMarco
Editor:
Youna Kwak, Jesse Moss
Producer:
Jesse Moss
Executive Producer:
James Marsh, Liz Garbus, Rory Kennedy

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A wonderful short film that explores how the strength and hope possessed by everyone maintains a bright future, even under the harshest conditions.

Season:
2003
Director:
Mehrdad Farid

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Afghanistan is not the kind of place one would expect to witness happiness, especially in the eyes of children who cannot truly comprehend concepts like war and hatred. All they see are their homes demolished daily, their families torn from them, and their own bodies ravaged by pain, fatigue, and hunger. Twenty-one clown doctors from around the world embark on a mission to carry cheerfulness and perhaps distraction to children injured in a country devastated by war.

Season:
2003
Director:
Enzo Balestrieri, Stefano Moser
Cinematography:
Stefano Moser
Editor:
Enzo Balestrieri, Stefano Moser, Roberto Ciani, Leonida Gennaro
Producer:
Marco Guidone, Giorgio Moser, David Grieco
Language:
English, Italian, and Pashtu with English subtitles

Running time: N/A

Can a "20-year-old movie about a failed relationship" be someone's guide through life? It can if you're Max, a college student obsessed with Woody Allen's Annie Hall to the point of sabotaging his own dates if necessary. Sharing his time between a radio show to which nobody listens and hanging out with his romance-challenged colleagues, Max seems bound for bachelorhood. That is, until he meets beautiful Julie, who is nothing less than his favorite film in the flesh. Will he be able to reach out to her, or will he be trapped forever by his own neurosis?

Season:
2003
Premiere status:
World Premiere
Director:
Van Flesher
Cinematography:
Stephan Schultze
Cast:
Gary Lundy, Sara Downing, Kim Murphy, Brian Klugman, Jay Paulson, Todd Duffey, Rini Bell, Kathleen Perkins
Editor:
Jeff Orgill, Chryss Terry, Randy Mack
Producer:
Randy Mack

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Quarry loves the lakeside community and his leisure time at the cabin, but what is the mob doing in town?

Season:
2003
Director:
Jeffrey Goodman

Running time: N/A

Black, gay, and a former Communist. Three strikes and you're out in 1950's America. Yet still Bayard Rustin, arguably the most underrated voice in the American civil rights movement, overcame the odds to become one of history's most influential figures. During the Montgomery bus boycott, Rustin met Martin Luther King and became a staunch advocate of Gandhi's non-violent protest philosophy. Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, and fired for his unwillingness to deny his beliefs.

Season:
2003
Director:
Nancy Kates, Bennett Singer
Cinematography:
Robert Shepard
Editor:
Veronica Selver, Rhonda Collins
Producer:
Sam Pollard, Nancy Kates, Bennett Singer

Running time: N/A

A joint product of Canada and Yugoslavia, with a screenplay by acclaimed novelist Svetislav Basara, Dragan Marinkovic's Boomerang manages to combine fast-paced action with literate dialogue, dark comedy with political allegory, and chaos with peace. For a group of likeable lowlifes in post-war Serbia, Boomerang isn't just the name of their favorite caf?; it's a way of life. A teenage girl falls in love with a mobster in a movie theatre. He wants to marry her, unaware that his partners are chasing her and their stolen drugs.

Season:
2003
Premiere status:
United States Premiere
Director:
Dragan Marinkovic
Cinematography:
Predrag Todorovic
Cast:
Lazar Ristovski, Paulina Manov, Nebojsa Glogovac, Dragan Jovanovic, Milena Dravic, Petar Bozovic
Editor:
Marko Glusac
Producer:
Bora Bulajic, Lazar Ristovski, Dejan Vrazalic
Language:
Serbian with English subtitles

Running time: N/A

San Jose director Sung H. Kim artfully uses Bay Area locations to take us into the lives of three Asian/Pacific-American childhood friends at a time when they are each struggling with their separate identities and what, if anything, they wish to achieve with their lives. Blue is an Asian-American twenty-something coasting along in life: a bike messenger in San Francisco by day and working the counter at a cafe at night. His roommates and best friends are Michael, a Silicon Valley type yuppie, and Bounce, a professional student who is happy just to be stoned 24 hours a day.

Season:
2003
Director:
Sung H. Kim
Cinematography:
David Doko
Cast:
Michael Cheng, Mark Marking, Anna Laveria May, Joyce Thi Brew, Poppy Nguyen, Denice Lee, Samuel Sheng
Editor:
Kaoru Kim
Producer:
Sung H. Kim
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