Rob Nilsson

Adventure · Family

A small boy is hurt by a horse on his father's ranch and he refuses to even be near one ever again. When a storyteller called Seven arrives with his huge imposing horse Amanda, everything changes.

Drama

Bid is a self-styled urban commando determined to live outside the system and the law. A hustler in high end auto parts, he is homeless by choice. All his gear in a storage locker, he plies the city on a motorcycle, counting coup on the cops. Yve is Bid’s girl friend, bi-sexual, ambitious but without direction. Neither wants to compromise… but their friendship is about to go tragic.

Drama

Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.

Drama

"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice, Luz and Ken are star-crossed lovers in screenwriter Sal's script, until their desire takes shape, inscribing itself into a movie of their own design. Risking his sanity to save the screenplay, Sal struggles to regain control of his characters and satisfy the demands of his producer Lester (legendary Velvet Underground founder John Cale), driving a wedge between the lovers with a desperate attempt to seduce Luz.

Drama

After learning his stepfather has throat cancer, a lazy pool hustler takes on a high-stakes contender.

Drama

Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.

Documentary

After the birth of his grandson, Bobby Roth undertakes a cinematic investigation as to what constitutes being a "good man" in today's world. This voyage of discovery leads him to interview more than fifty of his friends, both men and women who he considers to be "good people," about their views on everything from how they were parented to their thoughts on feminism, change, and regrets they might have. Their answers both surprises and enlighten both the viewers and Bobby, himself.

Documentary

An in-depth look at documentarian Rob Nilsson.

Documentary

An 80-minute documentary following John Cale and Brian Eno in Moscow, London, and Wales during the creation of the album "Words for the Dying."

Drama

Anna Reringer leaves her husband and goes to San Francisco to fulfill her dream of becoming an actress.

Drama

Spoddy (Disend), a small-time car thief and master auto mechanic, hates cars and harbors contempt for most people, especially the losers of this world. Directed by Rob Nilsson, this film employs the aesthetic of Direct Action Cinema, which Nilsson developed to allow cast and crew maximum freedom to work as a jazz ensemble, improvising dialogue and action in situations articulated by the director.

A resident (Ryuki "Duke" Tenmaya) of a small Japanese island dreams of leaving his wife, heading to Tokyo and pursuing an acting career.

Crime

A job at Bill's Gun Shop, a permit to carry, and a chance to ride "shotgun" on a bounty-hunt seem like 23-year-old Dillon McCarthy's dream come true. When the gun kills, Dillon is forced to decide for himself: "What's the price of a permit to carry?"

After his mom leaves him and his little brother, Aaron is forced to help his abusive step-father with his credit card scam. Set in the East Bay Area, California - this surreal coming of age story follows four young people clumsily learning how to interact with the world around them.

Documentary

Worlds collide in this unconventional essay film, when filmmaker, film historian, and archivist Daniel Kremer seamlessly edits Michelangelo Antonioni's legendary but controversial counterculture art film Zabriskie Point (1970) into the same narrative universe as Stanley Kramer's madcap epic comedy extravaganza It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). In creating these new sequences, Kremer comes to recognize that the exercise effortlessly draws cultural and historical parallels in twentieth-century American life that echo in present-day America. The editorial mashups weave a tangled web of social and cinematic history that root our notions of Americana in the mythology of the desert. As Kremer expounds in his narration on these often astonishing and sometimes shocking associations, his very personal ties to the subject matter become manifest.

Drama

Four interlocking stories with a Jazz theme. Four Women go out to visit the sites of the jazz clubs where Lou, 65 and dying of cancer, claims she once performed as a young singer. It's election night, Nov. 8, 2016 and the women follow the results on their cell phones. It's also opening night for the C Flat jazz club where they end the evening up as their worst fears are realized: Trump has won the election.