deadCENTER Film Festival 2008

40 Day Fast chronicles the high-impact, three-continent adventures of a young archaeologist searching out the Holy Land to find historical relics and answers to the deepest human questions. During his quest, Brandon (our fearless guide) tests the limits of his mind and body through a 40 Day Fast. Despite fatigue and exhaustion, the discipline of fasting gives Brandon a heightened insight and spiritual awareness, helping him expose dozens of new artifacts and previously unseen or unfilmed sites. 40 Day Fast is an honest and powerful search for evidence, faith, and the core of the human spirit.

A three-part sci-fi epic that follows Captain Thunder as he attempts to rescue Grace Darling from Maglor, the dictator of the Dominion of Doom.

Alagados [Sim, No Mau Conduto] documents a fascinating Brazilian community of dazzling energy and overwhelming poverty and violence through the eyes of 23-year old Renato. Born into a society that marginalizes him and his peers, Renato is a striking ex-criminal who chooses to defy the stereotype and engage in the active development of his own identity as a father, a worker, and a musician. Drawn to the rhythms of an Afro-Brazilian percussion drumming group, Renato is offered an opportunity he could only have dreamed of and struggles to overcome the odds in order to make new choices for his future.

So he sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed himself with Alicja, though he knew he had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality -- the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds.

A girl acquires a special power and uses it to help others. But her good deeds don't always yield the results she hopes for.

Carrie and Mary Dann are feisty elderly Western Shoshone sisters who live and ranch in north central Nevada. They have always grazed their livestock on the range outside their ranch. That range is part of sixty million recognized by the U.S. as Western Shoshone land in the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. In 1974, the U.S. sued the Dann sisters for trespassing on United States Public Land without a permit. Their dispute swept to the United States Supreme Court and eventually to the United Nations. Contrasting the Dann's personal lives and political actions, American Outrage examines why the United States would spend millions prosecuting and persecuting two elderly women grazing a few hundred horses and cows in a desolate desert?

AMERICAN TEEN is the touching and hilarious Sundance hit that follows the lives of five teenagers - a jock, a popular girl, a heartthrob, an artsy girl and a geek – in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future. Filming daily for ten months, filmmaker Nanette Burstein (ON THE ROPES, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) developed a deep understanding of her subjects. The result is a film that goes beyond the enduring stereotypes of high school to render complex young people trying to find their way into adulthood. With extraordinary intimacy and a great deal of humor, AMERICAN TEEN captures the pressures of growing up – pressures that come from one’s peers, one’s parents, and not least, oneself.

Eighteen-year-old future journalist Sam Archer has always been the black sheep in her traditional southern family, but when she decides to go undercover during rush in the very sorority that her mother and sister have been pushing her to join, Sam finds herself in the middle of a strangely alluring world full of teacups, skits, and sisterhood. Sam infiltrates the sorority known as ABD, and slowly gets lured in by their shrewd ways. Can she fight it, and finish her article, or will the pull of sisterhood and cute clothes prove too hard to resist?

Films in Program: In the Movies Leda Beyond Her Art Bending Space