Tacoma Film Festival 2009

It's almost 5 p.m. on Friday. Time to go home. But a routine fire drill threatens to delay the weekend of freedom. Forgetting security card keys will expire this weekend, four employees decide to take a shortcut up the back stairwell after the drill concludes. With several rejected attempts to open their floor's door with their card keys the four trek back downstairs only to find that the janitor has unknowingly locked them in. Soon they discover that they are trapped for the weekend. After escaping befuddles them, they're forced to make the best of it. How long can the corporate rhetoric last?

'I could care less about Lewis and Clark,' says Darrell Robes Kipp, "To me they represent the beginning of a never ending stream of westward expansion." Since his return to the Blackfeet reservation twenty years ago, Kipp, a writer and educator, has worked to save the Blackfeet language from extinction through the Blackfeet Immersion School he co-founded. Seeing an opportunity to promote his agenda, Kipp decides to get involved with the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial to ensure that the American Indian side of history is not forgotten. While serving on the commission, Kipp is approached by celebrated and quirky symphony composer Rob Kapilow to collaborate on a unique symphony project that will reflect on the legacy today of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Initially intending to set the journals of Lewis and Clark to music, Kapilow is excited by the idea of creating a symphony that focuses on the American Indian side of the story. Kipp is intrigued by this idea and agrees to collaborate with Kapilow. It is the beginning of an artistic journey that will challenge this odd couple as they work against deadline to produce words and music that will be performed by symphonies in St. Louis, New Orleans, and finally Helena, Montana.

In the summer of 2008, militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) declared an "oil war" in Nigeria. This was one of the biggest spikes yet on a radar screen dotted with conflict and tragedy. Sweet Crude is the story of the Niger Delta; of the villagers of Oporoza, headquarters of the insurgency; and of members of the armed resistance who, in the three years since the filmmakers met them as college students, became the young men of MEND.

David Karr, husband, father, White House press reporter, film producer, powerful millionaire, defense contractor, Corporate CEO, renaissance businessman… soviet agent? Ten for Grandpa is a fast paced, introspective look at the enigmatic life of a most influential ancestor. Structured by a list of unanswered questions, the film takes an analytical, clear-eyed, and often comedic look at the life of this complex character and the events surrounding his untimely demise. An existential hero operating outside the everyday constraints of society, or a sociopathic loose canon willing to indiscriminately betray associates, friends and family members alike in the service of his obsessive ambition? Ten for Grandpa reaches to understand the forces that push an individual to immerse himself in a nefarious web of danger and infamy. Rooting the narrative thematically by looking at the consequences of secrecy on the family, our narrator tries to decipher if his forbearer really was a shrewdly manipulative antihero or simply a victim of a McCarthy witch hunt and State Department character assassination. If his most precarious choice was deciding to do business with the USSR at the height of the cold war, or if he really was a vehicle for international deception and skullduggery. With a multifaceted approach, the film reconsiders the romanticized popular conception of the secret agent. Deflating the quixotic convention of a dapper playboy, and replacing it with an elusive serial-husband who had as much difficulty dealing with the blurred lines of rivaling international superpowers as he did raising his own children. Far from answering these impossible questions, Ten for Grandpa evokes the specter of the enigmatic lineages and the unseen forces that inform our personalities and family lives. At its crux, the film is a snapshot of a fascinating ancestor, and the skeletons that rattle away in our closets. Ten for Grandpa was filmed on Super 35mm film, framed with a 2.35:1 screen aspect ratio.

Witness the birth of a monster in 'Thorns', an experimental short which blends elements of screwball comedy, romance, silent films and classic and modern horror, with homages to Hitchcock and German Expressionism.A gorgeous woman and an eccentric man spend a romantic evening together at the man's apartment. The woman, intent on seducing the man, makes the first move, but the man is torn between memories of his former girlfriend and his attraction to the woman and his desire to move on. Their interaction becomes an ever-intensifying spiral of seduction and evasion, culminating with the man rushing off to another room. But just as the woman is about to leave, the man returns with a mysterious box, which, once opened, gives rein to the man's subconscious impulses, and drives the evening to its shocking conclusion.The movie explores the lines between love and hate, lust and violence, the conscious and the subconscious, and the relationship between predator and prey, while attempting to push the boundaries the protagonist/antagonist paradigm and of the viewers' sympathy.

In the heart of suburbia, a little boy sets a trap for the Tooth Fairy and discovers that even innocence has a dark side.

Last night Rhett Somers, so far scraping by on good luck or just plain old ignorance, met the love of his life. He's sure of it. She doesn't know. Now the only thing left to do is convince her that she's the one. Not an easy feat considering how they met.

Carty Fox has struggled with his drinking and the blackouts that attend it for as long as he can remember. But now, having jumped into the sober world one more time, he attempts to pull himself out of the gloom and into a more normal life. But what does that normal life look like? For Carty, the answer arrives in the form of a message written on a twenty-dollar bill. A message which begins to intrigue him, to take hold of him, and finally drag him into an obsession. An obsession that leads him on a journey into a Lynchian landscape of shame, rage, and pain. A journey that forces him to reflect on his own life and, perhaps, to catch sight of the shadowy person he has imprisoned for all these years in his drunken state of mind. But will the experience of looking at the man in the mirror set him free or send him over the edge into never ending darkness?

Oren, Christi, Nick and Todd work at a discount grocery store. Todd has intimate with Oren's girlfriend Christi. Nick devises the plot for a perfect murder in which Oren would set Todd up for Christi's murder, leaving Todd to serve the death penalty, thus murdering both of them. Two for one. When Oren discovers Christi has been murdered, he assumes Nick is responsible and calls on Todd for help to give her body back to Nick so they can call the police. When their plan becomes compromised, Oren disappears, leaving Todd to decide whether or not to help his dead lover's boyfriend escape a murder sentence, while dealing with Nick's indifference towards the crime he has just committed.