Bill Seery

Filmmaker Alan Berliner documents his first cousin, the poet-translator Edwin Honig, as he succumbs to Alzheimer's.

Photographer Barnard Jacobs is dying and Ashley, the woman he loves, won't admit her feelings for him. She's too wrapped up in her cocaine addiction and desire to find a wealthy husband. When fashionista Madeleine begs Barnard to call Ashley for drugs, a party develops. Madeline pairs off with a rich tech executive named Boccaccio. Barnard goes home, where Ashley, seeking peace and solitude, joins him. In flashback, Barnard recalls how his best friend Pickering hired him to take photos of women's eyes. He hired Ashley and the two forged a deep connection. Back in the present, Boccaccio and Madeleine do drugs and become removed from the world. As Barnard learns death is near, he reaches out to Ashley in a final attempt to save both of them.

In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.

The Flooded Playground is a digitally composed animated fairy tale about a young child who resides in a house which has a darkly disturbing force that oppresses him in body, mind and spirit. The wallpaper torments him, a malevolent wind deters him from eating, and thorned vines erupt in his bedroom. A sudden cataclysm throws him into a craggy wonderland where he wanders into deep forests and through his inner inferno in a quest to mend his damaged spirit. Thematically, this film is concerned with the amorphous fears, covert brutality, yearnings, and magical thinking of childhood, the resiliency of the human spirit, and the meaning of home. Lush visual images depict the emotional complexities of childhood - the combination of helplessness and invincibility, sweetness and brutality, and the edge where lines between the real and the imaginary are blurred.

When Jill Godmilow’s documentary Roy Cohn/Jack Smith premiered at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival, the number of AIDS-related deaths was reaching an all-time high in the United States (over 270,000). In New York City, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, many artists and filmmakers were grappling with the disease. While Broadway was hosting the second part of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America, downtown New Yorkers were fondly recalling another recent production, Ron Vawter’s one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in which the actor, who died of AIDS in April 1994, performed two monologues, first as Cohn, the conservative lawyer, and secondly, as Smith, the flamboyant experimental filmmaker—both of whom died of AIDS-related causes in the late 1980s.