Woods Hole Film Festival 2009

The traces left by the era of the samurai are still with us today. From this rich history of this ancient warrior culture comes a tale of honor, vengeance and redemption with a dark, sense of meaningless fatality. It is the origin story of a cursed vigilante, Ai, hell-bent on disposing those responsible for her clan’s demise.The young female sensei and savoir, Yoshizo, has molded Ai into a deadly and ruthless warrior. When Ai injures her master in the heat of a training battle, Yoshizo demands that she kill him.Ai, angered and confused by this, flees the scene only to be assaulted by a group of samurai. Ai easily dispenses the samurai but the leader of the group, Kyuzaemon, takes her down. He exposes a birthmark on her wrist, a bizarre clue to her identity as a cursed child, confirming this is the girl he has been searching for.Ai tries to escape with no success. But Yoshizo makes a sudden return and forces Kyuzaemon to a deadly face off. Whoever wins the battle must then deal with Ai before her curse kills them both.Inspired by the great tradition of samurai cinema, Ai is an exploration of the era of the samurai and explores the themes of dormant fury for those who have lost loved ones and are driven to the point of madness with revenge.

An hungry alien travels alone in his spaceship. He spies a lone cow on a small floating island and daydreams about how he can take the cow to his home planet and prepare for himself a big dinner made from the cow. When he tries to put his plan into action things quickly go awry. And his dream of having a cow for dinner goes by the wayside.

In the past year the federal government committed over 12 trillion dollars of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street. Many people would like to know why. “I don’t think most people really understood that they were in a casino” says award-winning financial reporter Mark Pittman. “When you’re in the Street’s casino, you’ve got to play by their rules.” American Casino takes a look at who profited from those rules and who lost the game. Beginning on the dark December evening in 2000 in the U. S. Senate chamber, when a friend of Wall Street slipped the casino’s rules into American law, we meet the players. A former Bear Stearns banker candidly explains that the complex securities he designed were “fourth dimensional” and sold to “idiots.” A senior Wall Street ratings agency executive describes how he finally resigned rather than “guess” the worth of billion dollar securities. A mortgage loan salesman admits how borrowers’ incomes were casually inflated to justify a loan. A billionaire describes how he made a massive bet that people would lose their homes and has won $500 million, so far. We also meet the casino’s “chips.” Ordinary people in the city of Baltimore whose investments in what was sold to them as the "American Dream" turned into nightmares of debt and disaster. These are not the homebuyers of Wall Street legend who heedlessly “bought houses they couldn’t afford," but instead these people took out loans they could probably have afforded, if the terms had not been obscured and if the casino rulebook had not classified them and their neighbors as “sub-prime.” As American Casino reveals, this is the grim truth at the heart of our current financial disaster. Filmed over twelve months in 2008 American Casino takes you inside a game that our grandchildren never wanted to play.

It's the end of term, and the undergrads in Professor Lowe's fiction writing class are all worked up. When class hottie Mandy Shaw presents her short story to the class, Brendan Mahoney's erotic reading of the piece has the class in an uproar. Professor Lowe is too busy checking out the barely clothed Mandy to notice. Later, in Professor Lowe's office, a stoned Brendan tries to explain, but his conference is broken up by the appearance of Mandy herself. Professor Lowe and Mandy share an awkward and intimate conversation about fiction, horses, and her habit of 'going for older guys.' With career, family and morality hanging in the balance, Professor Lowe must make a fateful decision. Based on the short story by Boston Phoenix writer/novelist Steve Almond.

A small tale of an enormous problem, Askari delves into the results of violence and shows the line between victim and victimizer to be in truth, a cycle.

Scott Bateman has taken the sound from the 1960 horror film Atom Age Vampire and given it new animated visuals, revealing that the movie is really just a love triangle between a pirate, a stripper, and an evil doctor who sometimes turns into a radioactive monster. Bateman has also provided hilarious onscreen commentary about the action, or lack of it. Scott Bateman animated every frame of the film in Flash; the budget for this movie was quite literally zero.

A man discovers more than he expected when he seeks shelter in an isolated bar.

Based on the diary written by 80-year-old Jessie Singer Sylvester between 1976 and1978, we enter an ordinary life full of undiscovered riches. As she struggles to make ends meet and reaches out to better herself, Jessie faces the growing violence in her neighborhood and the realization that she is finally and completely alone. The words of the Walt Whitman poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” run through the film as Jessie’s strength and resilience carry her to the next chapter of her life.