Besties Make Movies

Surprise! Oliver reveals a luxurious NYC hotel suite to his blindfolded fiancée Victoria, an extravagant expense made possible with the help of Victoria’s wealthy, manipulative mother. Recovering from depression, Victoria is newly off her meds and feeling uneasy. She attempts to relax and enjoy the evening, but discerning between visions and reality becomes increasingly difficult when eerie events begin to occur – a bathtub filled with blood, a bellhop ushering her into a new, identical room, and Oliver showing up with a gash in his head. Is everything all in her head because she stopped taking her antidepressants? Or is there really a scheme to hurt them?

A romantic dramedy. Maureen and Jason are each having a very bad night. Their chance encounter gives both a glimmer of hope as they discover a shared past and a connection that brings light to the darkness in their lives.

Malka, a Holocaust survivor, begins seeing visions of her past during a family seder and must find hope in the present to survive, just as she did in the past.

Following the death of a young writer, her estranged friends gather to grant her dying wish: performing a play about their last days together.

Evocative yet playful, Life Forgotten asks, how does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change? Situating archival film in parallel with reenactment, the film conjures up New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, it centers on a real storefront cinema, Frank Seiden’s Variety Theater. Here silent movies were anything but. Frank and his sons improvised dialog for the films and sang Yiddish ballads to an audience that didn’t hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for women’s rights and change their world.