UCLA School of Film and Television

The Angler claims he will use a toxin which will kill sea life unless a ransom is paid. Aquaman races to stop him.

As the sun rises, we witness two male bodies emerge from the darkness. The younger of the two attempts to sneak out on the older man he just slept with.

Recovering from a traumatic break-up, Olivia is on the verge of a nervous breakdown when her friend Maya flies in from New York. From one failed attempt to another, their weekend starts to feel more like a test of their friendship. Will they pass?

Jamaa Fanaka’s first project plays off the Blaxploitation’s genre conventions, an adaption of Goethe’s “Faust” presented with a non-synchronous soundtrack and superimposed over a remake of Super Fly (1972). Often out of focus with an overactive camera, the film immediately exudes nervous energy, but unlike Priest’s elegant cocaine consumption in Super Fly, Willie’s arm gushes blood as he injects heroin. A morality tale in two reels. —Jan-Christopher Horak

Animation of a poem from Edith Sitwell's "Façade".

An eight-year-old boy experiences his first heartbreak when he falls in love with his male third-grade teacher.

An educational music film promoting the values of UCLA.

Filmed in response to the LAPD’s shooting of Eulia Love in 1979, Gidget Meets Hondo opens with stills taken by Bernard Nicolas of a demonstration against Love’s killing. Nicolas’ Gidget is a self-absorbed young white woman who remains clueless to the violence erupting around her, ultimately to her own peril. The film asks whether such police brutality would be tolerated if the victim were a middle-class white woman.

An Alien is sent to earth to investigate the "incubators." She discovers that she is replacing a rogue agent. She questions her mission.

Depicts one woman's struggle with the responsibility of juggling two jobs at one time as both a garage mechanic and God's chosen messiah. She faces a rather difficult career decision as her true passion is in the first job while her effectiveness in the second job grows more questionable.

As a woman anxiously awaits her overdue period, she performs African-based rituals of purification. She cleans house and body, and calls on the spirits (Orishas in the Yoruba tradition), receiving much needed inspiration and assurance in a dream. The film combines beautifully intimate still and moving images of the woman’s body and home space, along with playful stop-motion sequences. —Jacqueline Stewart, UCLA Film and Television Archive

Filmmaker Don Amis was one of the very few Black student filmmakers at UCLA (including Carroll Parrott Blue and Denise Bean) working in a documentary mode. In this film, preparations, parade and performances from the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s annual Festival of Mask illustrate L.A.’s diverse racial and ethnic communities (African, Asian, Latin American) expressing themselves through a shared traditional form.

This early UCLA student film by noted visual effects pioneer Robert Abel (1937-2001) employs a mixed media approach to distill the kinetic energy of an industrial train depot into bold graphic elements. With a jazz score, Piet Mondrian-inspired lines and Oskar Fischinger-style movement, the highly-accomplished animated short evokes the modernist works of Saul Bass and Ray and Charles Eames.

In 1963 a boy and his mother are left in Saigon while his father and brother flee to seek shelter from religious persecution in North Vietnam. The two brothers meet as strangers in a hapless confrontation during the war in 1973.

A prescient portrait of late-1970s Washington, D.C., that chronicles the city's creeping gentrification, the systematic expulsion of poor Black residents, and the community response in the form of the Seaton Street Project, in which tenants banded together to purchase buildings.

Serena starts reflecting on the commitment in her own relationship with Donielle when she is asked to be the maid of honor for her former lover Tisha's wedding.

Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. —Allyson Nadia Field

UCLA Student Television Program, preserved from a 2-inch videotape by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Student play set in the Korean War in 1952. Drama concerns a small group of American soldiers that are precariously holed up in a fortified bunker in hostile territory.

When Cassandra witnesses a drunken encounter between her friend and her roommate, she is compelled to investigate if it was consensual.

Writer-director Robert Wheaton’s story of a shy guy, Mark (Parros), trying all the wrong moves to meet the right girl rides high on a romantic sensibility. Although at first it’s hard to imagine the handsome Mark having trouble with the ladies, Parros gives a charming performance as the nice guy who finishes last. UCLA’s north campus features prominently as this would-be Romeo’s ever-hopeful hunting ground.