Capturing the Friedmans

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

ONLY IN THEATERS, a film by actor/director Raphael Sbarge, is an intimate and moving journey taken with the Laemmle family, spanning nearly three years of challenges, losses, and personal triumphs. Laemmle Theatres, the beloved 84-year-old arthouse cinema chain 3rd generation family business in Los Angeles, is facing seismic change and financial pressure. Yet the family behind this multigenerational business – whose sole mission has been to support the art of film – is determined to survive.

An ordinary funeral procession moves along its path from church to cemetery. Observing, you slip from reality into a place where time has lost its linearity, looping through the odd images thrown off by a distorted reality. Images of non-existence, of varying reflections of death issuing from both past and future, concrete yet abstract, horrible yet desirable. A family asks a young psychiatrist to be their guest for a while to untangle the circumstances of their father's illness. He's developed a suicidal fixation for ropes and knots among other things. While deeply involved in analyzing the patient's delirium, the doctor begins to lose track of what is taking place. The task of "how to help" is twisted into "who am I? Doctor or patient? Chance guest, member of this suffering family, or a catholic priest who has dreamed this all up?" In order to get a handle on it all, it's best to start from the beginning, but why do things keep shifting, changing?

A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.

The lives of three men who were childhood friends are shattered when one of them suffers a family tragedy.

An emotionally scarred highway drifter shoots a sadistic trick who rapes her, and ultimately becomes America's first female serial killer.

Marnie is a thief, a liar, and a cheat. When her new boss, Mark Rutland, catches on to her routine kleptomania, she finds herself being blackmailed.

Marie-Philip is a PhD student and part-time professor who loves cats and Harry Potter. But one week before her 29th birthday, she is diagnosed with breast cancer. For a year, without false modesty, we follow her through each step as she confides in us with shocking honesty. An ode to life, to courage and to the resilience of all those who fight every day against disease.

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

Inspector Nick Cafmeyer seems to have it all - looks, brains and a successful career. But a dark cloud hangs over his life: since the age of nine, he has been haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his younger brother, Bjorn. Plettinckx, a known sex offender, was questioned but quickly released. Plettinckx lives close by and takes fiendish pleasure in harassing Nick. Then, when a disturbing case comes to light involving a missing nine-year-old, Nick heads a massive search which turns into a relentless manhunt.