"Is reality simply a frame of mind?"
Central explores the limitations of sanity as different facets of her persona usher her through psychosis.
Social & External
The people behind it
Bella Marino
Central
Che Ethridge
Narrator/Presence 3
Maya Pegues
Presence 1
Jackson Reid
Presence 2
Jenna Puszewski
Presence 4
Brooklyn Cunningham
Presence 5
Devon Green
Presence 6
Shelby Freshwater
Presence 7
A New York City couple decide to take a getaway trip to Texas, but unknowingly cross paths with the wrong kind of people.
A telephone operator from Mexico City tries to support a family and her passion for popular dance.
Inside a bathroom, a woman dissolves. Not into water—but into identity. Set in an oneiric, liminal space, this experimental short dissects the most banal of routines—eliminate, change, wash—and refracts them through the prism of identity. What do we flush away, what do we conceal with powder and polish, what residue do we scrub from the self? The film doesn't offer answers. It exists in the space between viewer and image, where meaning is slippery and selfhood runs down the drain.
Shaken by a divorce in the 1920s, Portuguese poetess Florbela Espanca uses her writing to deal with her tumultuous relationship with men, eroticism and love.
A socially awkward, neurodivergent youth struggles to adapt at a social gathering that quickly takes a turn into the uncanny and surreal.
The story begins the day before the graduation ceremony. Five middle school girls each are preoccupied with their real everyday lives. These girls meet each other in a fantasy world after being sent there through a sudden occurrence. There, they learn about the impending crisis that this world is facing. The way to avert this crisis is for the five to collaborate and bring their five hearts together as one through dance. However, the five cannot come to love the world, and cannot tell their true feelings to one another, so their hearts are unable to unite. The time limit is fast approaching. Can the dance of the five girls save the world? And will they be able to graduate?
A love story recounted not by them, but by their belongings and surroundings.
A melodic singer, a man in his underwear, and two people with telekinesis abilities with a saint.
"Vlada Goes to London" is a short student film exploring the strong-willed Vlada on her night shift as a pizza delivery girl in her desperate attempt to book tickets to London and fulfill her dream of being a DJ. The end of the night brings more challenges than she expects.
An aloof librarian chooses to reflect on the consequences of her lifelong curse of perpetual luck - a coin with seemingly more than two sides.
A search for a house leads to a chance encounter between a lonely young man and a lively young dance teacher, changing the course of both their lives.
An experimental short assembled from YouTube videos of the director’s former classmate, TV fragments, and a 2006 graduation interview recorded in Alchevsk. What starts as an ironic play with early-2000s home-video aesthetics slowly falls apart. Through montage of personal and online material, Chepelev tries to reconnect with a man he once loved – a man whom war and time have made almost unrecognisable. Laughter loses its protective function and gives way to the impossible wish to return to a place that no longer exists.
Bounced from her job, Erin Grant needs money if she's to have any chance of winning back custody of her child. But, eventually, she must confront the naked truth: to take on the system, she'll have to take it all off. Erin strips to conquer, but she faces unintended circumstances when a hound dog of a Congressman zeroes in on her and sharpens the shady tools at his fingertips, including blackmail and murder.
Collective experimental film by Team 8mm TENGOKU.
In pre-revolution Cuba, Katey Miller is about to defy everyone's expectations. Instead of a parent-approved suitor, Katey is drawn to the sexy waiter, Javier, who spends his nights dancing in Havana's nightclubs. As she secretly learns to dance with Javier, she learns the meanings of love, sensuality and independence.
A documentary about the sea and memory. Its movement is its form. Its strength.
Isolated in the bell tower of Notre Dame, Quasimodo longs to experience the world beyond the cathedral walls, despite the wishes of his stern guardian, the Judge of Paris Claude Frollo. His first venture into the city leads him to Esmeralda, a fearless Romani woman whose defiance of Frollo's tyranny draws her—and Quasimodo—into his dangerous obsession.
A group of 12 teenagers from various backgrounds enroll at the American Ballet Academy in New York to make it as ballet dancers and each one deals with the problems and stress of training and getting ahead in the world of dance.
Renata is recovering from a cerebrovascular thrombosis that marked the end of her dance career. A year later, she starts to regain her bodily autonomy and feels confident to rekindle her intimacy with her husband. But before she does, she must face her changing feelings towards her emotionally distant husband, Jaime, who is in denial that their relationship has changed.
Dr. Alan Stone breaks new ground for treatment of the mentally ill through an experiment on three paranoid schizophrenic patients who believe they are Jesus Christ.
A computer hacker's goal to discover the reason for human existence continually finds his work interrupted thanks to the Management; this time, they send a teenager and lusty love interest to distract him.
A woman watches time pass beside the suitcases of her ex-lover (who is supposed to come pick them up but never arrives) and a restless dog who doesn't understand that his master has abandoned him.
A drama centered on a go-go dancer with multiple personality disorder who struggles to remain her true self and begins working with a psychotherapist to uncover the mystery of the inner ghosts that haunt her.
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
A troubled rock star descends into madness in the midst of his physical and social isolation from everyone.
A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the lifecycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.
An aimless young man who is scalping tickets, gambling and drinking, agrees to coach a Little League team from the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago as a condition of getting a loan from a friend.
On the outside, Helen has it all – a loving family and a successful career – but when her suppressed mental illness resurfaces, the world crumbles around her. Crippled by depression, Helen finds solace through her friendship with Mathilda, a kindred spirit struggling with bipolar disorder.
A bureaucrat interviews five souls to decide which of them will be given a life on Earth. But he soon faces an existential challenge of his own.
After the lewd and frenetic Dance of the Seven Veils, and with the solemn pledge from the very lips of Herod himself that she could have whatever her heart desires up to half his kingdom, wanton and proud young Salomé comes before her king with an unreasonable demand. Beguiled by John the Baptist, and then scorned for the sake of his god, lascivious Salomé—encouraged by her mother, the vindictive, Herodias—commands that John be executed and his head delivered on a silver platter.
A successful "house tuner" in New York City, who calibrates the sound in people's homes in order to adjust their moods, meets a client with a problem he can't solve.
Suffering from a severe case of depression, toy company CEO Walter Black begins using a beaver hand puppet to help him open up to his family. With his father seemingly going insane, adolescent son Porter pushes for his parents to get a divorce.
A psychotherapist helps a law student cope with schizophrenia in one of five interconnected tales dealing with mental illness.
South America, 1960. A lonely and grumpy Holocaust survivor convinces himself that his new neighbor is none other than Adolf Hitler. Not being taken seriously, he starts an independent investigation to prove his claim, but when the evidence still appears to be inconclusive, Polsky is forced to engage in a relationship with the enemy in order to obtain irrefutable proof.
A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
The story of a young writer's transformation when her past invades her present.
A woman is released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime and re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past.
Matthew, a young schizophrenic, finds himself out on the street when a slumlord tears down his apartment building. Soon, he finds himself in even more dire straits, when he is threatened by Little Leroy, a thug who is one of the tough denizens of the Fort Washington Shelter for Men. He reaches out to Jerry, a streetwise combat veteran, who takes Matthew under his wing as a son. The relationship between these two men grows as they attempt to conquer the numbing isolation of homelessness.
A disturbed and institutionalized 16-year-old girl struggles between fantasy and reality.