University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts

An idle, Arab American stoner discovers a portal to the war memories of his mother's past while doing the laundry chore.

A passport photographer named Steven Forrest is petrified of death following the sudden demise of his fearless buddy in a martini accident.

A rookie Air Force drone pilot finds himself increasingly attached to a target he watches from halfway around the world.

A young man in Oakland, California, wakes with a heavy heart and decides to take a walk through the neighborhood to the local barbershop.

A delicious sense of dark humor in which a nerdy, young feet-fetishist, a department store management trainee, is assigned to women’s shoes with painfully funny results.

Alice Ball, a 23 year-old African American Chemist living in 1915 Hawaii fights against racial and gender barriers to find an effective treatment for leprosy before Kalani, a 10-year-old patient is exiled into the leper colony of Molokai.

Two high-school, lesbian girlfriends deal with the intrusion of two teenage boys, jealousy, betrayal and drugs.

A businessman lives out his daily routine until he meets unexpected stress in the form of his apartment building's elevator.

Amidst the outbreak of the 1910 Manchurian Plague, a young Chinese doctor must defy prejudices of both the East and the West to champion his groundbreaking theory about the disease's deadly evolution.

After a tumultuous rise to power, the first Muslim Sultana of Delhi fights to guide her kingdom while the people closest to her plot against her.

In South Los Angeles, a young mother's love for her daughter is put to the test.

An eight-year-old girl tries to build a relationship with her absent father through a class-assigned family tree.

After saving an abused pit bull, a troubled Brighton Beach teenager who makes ends meet through crime while raising his little brother, must protect the dog from its nefarious owners.

For Los Angeles natives living in the early 1900s, bicycles and streetcars shared the road as our primary modes of transportation. But the arrival of the freeway effectively wiped them out. Today, a collective of cycling communities fight for protected bike lanes and road safety, determined to bring a new era of mobility justice to the city.

In 1936 Harlem, the first all-Black cast to perform Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', directed by a young and arrogant Orson Welles, battles to make it to opening night.

In a dystopian future where telepaths are deployed at the service of a militant regime, a mute girl takes revenge on her father's killer while simultaneously helping the resistance.

A lonely Singaporean death row guard tries to help a young Australian convicted of drug trafficking accept her fate despite a bizarre contradiction - he is her executioner.

Once a successful Syrian actor, Jihad Abdo is now struggling as a refugee while trying to reinvent his life and rebuild his career.

Once a successful Syrian actor, Jihad Abdo is now struggling as a refugee while trying to reinvent his life and rebuild his career.

"Ladies Knight" is Joe Rothenberg's undergrad senior thesis project from USC's Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts.