21 monologues written by American playwrights form a sort of fractured portrait of the American collective psyche. Ranging from the sad to the hilarious, from the angry to the tentatively celebratory, many of the major and recurrent issues associated with our fraught but beloved union are reconsidered with elegance, wit, brutal honesty, and a little outright insanity.
Joe Fulton
Meanwhile concerns Joe Fulton, a man who can do anything from fixing your sink to arranging international financing for a construction project. He produces online advertising and he’s written a big fat novel. He’s also a pretty good drummer. But success eludes him. For Joe can’t keep himself from fixing other people’s problems. His own ambitions are constantly interrupted by his willingness and ability to go out of his way for others.
Himself (Interviewer)
A series of impromptu interviews with Hal Hartley, Adrienne Shelly, and some of Hartley's other most frequent collaborators on his style, career, and process.
An artist-criminal far from home asks his assistant to pirate a rare videotape before the German Post Office Authorities come to confiscate it.
Father Lang
Many years after her notorious husband, Henry Fool, fled after killing a neighbor, Fay Grim receives a visit from CIA agent Fulbright, who tells her that Henry is dead, but that some of his journals have been unearthed in France. She sets forth on a globe-trotting odyssey that soon leads to the discovery that he is alive, and his journals are more than they appear to be.
Abercrombie
A comic drama about a time in the near future when citizens are happy to be property traded on the stock exchange.
Director
Written by legendary theater artist, Richard Foreman, Planet Earth: Dreams revolves around the desire to escape -- not to a Dream world -- but to a mode of consciousness in which one is able to function in real life with the same mental freedom the dream mind has available in the realm of sleep.
Excerpts from performances of Hal Hartley's play "Soon", a production inspired by the 1993 events in Waco, Texas involving the religious sect called the Branch Davidians and their collision with the US Federal Government.
A young doctor believes that the spirit of his late wife has possessed a troubled patient in his hospital.
Agent
Beatrice's fiancé is killed by a monster in Iceland. The monster is immortal, but longs to die. Beatrice helps him achieve this by contacting a scientist who can destroy matter painlessly.
Teacher
This film is the visual component of the multi-media collaboration between the composer Louis Andriessen and Hal Hartley.
Lawyer
The end of the millenium has taken on a certain significance in modern day prophecies. What happens if Jesus Christ has second thoughts about the Apocalypse? It is December 31, 1999 and New Year's Eve takes on new meaning when the Devil, Jesus Christ, and Christ's assistant Magdelina discuss and debate the end of the world, the opening of the seven seals, and the essence of being human.
