The Manhattan Front

Flat Is Beautiful is an experimental live-action cartoon using masks, animation, subtitles, drawings, and dramatic scenes to investigate the psychic life of an androgynous eleven-year-old girl. Growing up in a working class neighborhood with her single mother and gay roommate, Taylor confronts the loneliness of living between masculine and feminine in a culture obsessed with defining gender difference. Shifting between black and white film and grainy pixelvision video, Flat is Beautiful explores the internal and external worlds of sad people.

These five short videos introduce Judy, a paper maché puppet who ruminates on her position in society. Like Judy, of the famous Punch and Judy puppet duo, Benning’s Judy seems to experience the world from the outside, letting things happen to her rather than making things happen around her.

Laninbwil's Gift is the story of Jacob, an old island man with a complicated secret. When Jacob was a teenager, a noniep, a Marshallese fairy known for helping troubled souls, transformed him from a simpleton into a normal young man. This favor, however, came with a cost: The noniep made Jacob promise that one day he must bestow this new-found intelligence upon another deserving person. After a lifetime of pondering this otherworldly commitment to the noniep, Jacob discovers Laninbwil, a homeless young man. Just when Jacob begins to get close to the troubled youth, Laninbwil unwittingly gets caught up in a war of mystical power between an evil Mejenkwar, a demon that possesses pregnant women, and her archenemy, the gifted, shamanic old woman, Lijimu.

Carl and Katie are the kind of people that never normally meet, but they're also the kind of people that retreat to the toilets when they need to sort themselves out. But some muddles need more than a big mirror and the smell of cleanliness, sometimes they need a nose bleed.

Two sisters - Kim, a student, and Missy, an aspiring WAG - hatch a plan to make money from their insider football knowledge.

Some time ago, Robert took some photos of military action which are now endangering his life. He is on the run from those who would find their publication damaging and is headed for Syria, where he believes he will be safe. While in Istanbul, he meets a pop singer, a woman half his age who gives him the erotic charge of his life. He begins taking film of their bedroom encounters and says some pretty excessive things about how marvelous she is to him. Meanwhile, his local friends don't trust or like him enough to help him stay in Istanbul, and it seems that he will have to continue onward in his journey to safety.

Raised in the small all-Black Florida town of Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston studied at Howard University before arriving in New York in 1925. She would soon become a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But even as she gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas. She would make several trips to the American South and the Caribbean, documenting the lives of rural Black people and collecting their stories. She studied her own people, an unusual practice at the time, and during her lifetime became known as the foremost authority on Black folklore.

In the summer of 1939, 13-year-old Marie goes with her parents to visit her grandparents in a small town near Avignon. Marie discovers her femininity and falls for a young Jewish doctor, but he prefers Eva, Marie's mother.

A mute Scottish woman arrives in colonial New Zealand for an arranged marriage. Her husband refuses to move her beloved piano, giving it to neighbor George Baines, who agrees to return the piano in exchange for lessons. As desire swirls around the duo, the wilderness consumes the European enclave.

A family loaded with quirky, colorful characters piles into an old van and road trips to California for little Olive to compete in a beauty pageant.

Two lovers are separated but in a twist of fate, find themselves in a care of a syndicate leader. He is the bodyguard and she is the wife.