In BACKSEAT, a 'coming of age late' story about prolonged adolescence, two old friends flee New York City on a three-day road trip to Montreal to escape their problems and meet the great Donald Sutherland. Between running drugs and meeting a man who only communicates through instant messaging, they run head-on into the always lingering problem of real life. Directed by award-winning commercials director, Bruce van Dusen (who wrote and directed the Sundance hit COLD FEET) and written by and starring Josh Alexander, BACKSEAT is an off-beat and refreshing comedy about generation x as it struggles through prolonged adolescence and into adulthood. With a cast of truly wonderful up-and-comers (Will Janowitz from The Sopranos, Rob Bogue from Guiding Light, Aubrey Dollar from Fox's Point Pleasant) and featuring a soundtrack with some of the biggest indie acts currently playing the US music scene, BACKSEAT is that rare gem at film festivals - an entertaining, and ultimately moving snapshot of a few regular folks struggling to make sense of their lives and what they want from them.

Things are hard enough for the Schaffer family of Bittersweet Place, Long Island. Pappy, the widowed patriarch and his hapless son-in-law run a local car service that?s seen better days. His two adult daughters live at home in rooms they knew as children?posters from out-dated rock bands fading on the walls. Their neighborhood is changing, the insular town developing. Pappy idealizes the past, nostalgic for a simpler time. But when Paulie, the youngest daughter, stops taking her lithium and Pappy discovers he is ill, things quickly spiral out of control. Bittersweet Place is a portrait of a family in crisis, learning to love and survive. Troubled characters fighting fear and uncertainty--trying to overcome their own selfishness and xenophobia--people who know no boundaries, bumping and clawing furiously at each other?s lives. With empathy and humor, this story describes the messy production of a family, the burden and the intensity of feeling towards those we love.

ALEXANDRA BRODSKY --- WRITTER/DIRECTOR/PRODUCER Alexandra received her MFA from The Yale School of Art. She is an adjunct instructor at Long Island University. Alexandra has directed two short films, Didactic Encounter, based on the play by Elizabeth Benjami and Rabbi Rick and the Hamburger Choo-Choo. Both films have been screened at several international film festivals. Bittersweet Place is her first feature-length debut.

Danielson: a Family Movie is a documentary about unbridled creativity vs. accessibility, Christian faith vs. popular culture, underground music vs. survival, and family vs. individuality. The film follows Daniel Smith, an eccentric musician and visual artist, as he leads his four siblings and best friend to indie-rock stardom. Beginning in 1994 when the youngest band member was 10 years old, the Danielson Famile performs in white, vintage nurse costumes to symbolize the healing power of the Good News, a recurring subject matter. Though tepidly received by the Christian music world, the South Jersey farmland-bred clan is widely embraced by the mainstream independent music community, written about in Rolling Stone, Spin, the New York Times and elsewhere as an outsider curiosity backed up by innovative, experimental music. But as with other family acts, and particularly those that don't make much money, members of the band begin to seek out their own paths as they go through college and Daniel eventually faces the struggle to become viable as a solo act. With production starting in 2002, at a high water mark for the band, all the drama is played out before the camera making Danielson: a Family Movie both engaging and entertaining. Collage, direct cinema, animation and memorable performances all contribute to this thoughtful and thought-provoking spectacle.

"JL Aronson?s own documentary and experimental film work includes ""Senior Picture"" (distributed on the Kill Rock Stars ?Starter Set? DVD) and the feature documentary, ""Punk Rock/ Heavy Metal Karaoke"" (2001). He is also the founder of Creative Arson Productions, creating TV commercials, marketing videos and full-length programs for the Village Voice, Siren Music Festival, Central Park Summerstage, Coney Island, and Wired Magazine, among many others. A feature documentary about pigeon fanciers in a changing Brooklyn landscape will be released in 2007. "

Encompassing a single, fateful evening in the sprawling metropolis of Sao Paulo, Brazil, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT is a gritty, crime thriller which centers around an illicit transaction gone awry?Two Americans in exile?Rosso (Scott Glenn) and his son, Paul (Brendan Fraser)?have been carving out a living of sorts, operating a run-down nightclub-brothel. But, they both harbor dreams of getting out of the racket once and for all. One night, it seems their prayers are answered when a customer leaves behind a suitcase containing the means for them to change their fates. Rosso will take his beautiful, young wife Angie (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and their 5 year-old son Lazare to start over in a new city, far away. Paul will escape his mounting debts, an escalating coke habit, and finally be rid of his father (who he despises and blames for all of his problems). All will depend on one person?a Nigerian immigrant named Wemba (Mos Def)?who must make his way safely, trafficking the cash through the perilous, nocturnal underworld of Sao Paulo.

Eric Eason is a New York City-based filmmaker whose first feature Manito won the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and 14 other awards at festivals around the world, including the American Express Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2002 Tribeca Film Festival. Manito, released theatrically in 2003, went on to win the Gotham Award and receive three Independent Spirit nominations.

Julia Barker is late for work at the Paradise Bingo, again. Struggling to make ends meet and to raise her daughters, Julia suppresses her own needs and desires to support her family. But the headaches, excruciating migraines, keep coming.Inside her splitting mind, disturbing visions erupt: water, rafters and then the blinding white windows of a warehouse sized room. The space is menacing, mysterious and seductive. The visions intensify and soon there are signs. Julia knows that she must find the room. Desperate, she robs the Bingo hall, abandons her family and flies to New York. Her pilgrimage has begun.

Kyle has directed two documentaries: AMERICAN COWBOY, a ?98 Student Academy Award winner, and UNIVERSITY INC. (?99), a doc about the corporatization of the largest university in America. Kyle is also the editor of the Sundance award-winning film MANITO (?02), and the PBS documentaries ARE THE KIDS ALRIGHT (?04) and LEARNING TO SWALLOW (?05).. He calls Austin, Texas home, and ROOM marks his feature narrative film debut.

"In TELL ME DO YOU MISS ME, the four members of the celebrated New York-based indie-rock band LUNA confront the ceiling of their ambition, the harsh realities of their modest success, and their conflicted feelings about each other as they embark on their final world tour and uncertain futures.

Laced with moments of both humor and melancholia, TELL ME DO MISS ME earnestly exposes the underbelly of a touring rock band in their final days together.

Supported sonically with Luna's dreamy catalog of indie-pop and visually with lush travelogue footage with adventurous stops in England, Japan, and Spain, TELL ME DO YOU MISS ME is an elegy for an era."

"Matthew Buzzell is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker.

Matthew received his M.F.A. in Directing from the American Film Institute. Films include WHAT A GIRL WANTS (2001), Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew (2002). Putting The River In Reverse, is a document of the collaboration between music legends Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint as they embark on the first major recording sessions to take place in New Orleans post-Katrina.

Matthew?s most recently completed project, Companeras, tells the story of America?s first female Mariachi band. Currently, Matthew is in post-production with his debut narrative feature, a dark comedy starring Saturday Night Live cast-member Chris Parnell and Napolean Dynamite?s Diedrich Bader. The film is called Sunny and Share Love You."

"A meditation on the US/Mexico border in an age of homeland insecurity. A 2000 mile journey along the US/Mexico border reveals a geography of aspiration and insecurity. Brown considers the border as a landscape, at once physical, historical, and political.

"

"?To describe myself as documentary filmmaker is to own up to a troubled profession, what with its unfortunate aspiring to Truth and Objectivity. I?ve tried to cope with this by personalizing my films, insinuating my own voice and disavowing any pose of authority or conclusiveness. More than that, I?m interested in moving the documentary toward something like a metaphysics of fact, where fact materializes for a moment, only to dissolve into daydreams and melancholy and goosebumps. I find myself drawn again and again to the same spaces: those wide open, inbetween spaces; landscapes of abandoned things; border zones and landscapes of transition, whether on the far edges of Las Vegas suburban sprawl, or along the fence line of abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I?m drawn to the drama of transits and transitions played out on landscapes like these. I find myself drawn to the uncanny, too: UFOs and crop circles and ghost stories. The uncanny short-circuits the conclusiveness of our daily lives, which is something I like about it. I?m not sure if the uncanny has some special access to truth, but the uncanny and the true both are spooky. Both haunt us, hovering close by but just out of reach.?

Bill Brown"

"Bill Brown is a filmmaker from the ?Paris of the Plains,? Lubbock, Texas. He has made several short experimental documentaries about the dusty corners of the North American landscape. Along with filmmaker Tom Comerford, Brown created the Lo Fi Landscapes tour, traveling across country in 2002 and 2005 with a program of short films concerned with history and place.

Currently, Brown lives in Detroit."

Holly G. (played by Victoria Foyt), is a successful clothing designer with her own boutique. In the course of a tumultuous Mother?s Day weekend she is confronted with deceit, elation, desperation, kleptomania, rebellion, addiction and passion. All this while under pressure to save her business and her family in just two days! In addition to a compelling story line, the film is peppered with poignant testimonials (documentary style) from the women within the film who 'confess' the real and all too often unacknowledged role that shopping plays in their lives. Jaglom has created a film which deals with the often overlooked phenomenon of women?s addiction ?? both good and bad ? to shopping. A sister film to his earlier ?Eating? and ?Babyfever? it co-stars, Victoria Foyt, Lee Grant, Rob Marrow, Bruce Davison, Mae Whitman and Jennifer Grant.

Henry Jaglom. American actor/director/writer Henry Jaglom studied acting at the University of Pennsylvania, then completed his training at the Actors Studio in New York. Jaglom acted on stage and in TV, marking time in small roles until 1967, when Jaglom found a project that could provide his big break: a marathon documentary of the Israeli six-day war, which he filmed, wrote and edited, but which was never generally released. Back in the U.S. as an actor in 1968, Jaglom was able to attain backing for his first film directorial job, A Safe Place (1971). While capable of turning out a "safe" commercial film like Always (1985), Jaglom has preferred to work in a European-style cinema verite fashion, encouraging his actors to improvise within a "party" framework. The director's Someone to Love (1987), set during a birthday celebration, allowed Orson Welles in his last screen appearance to expouse his philosophies to his heart's content. Jaglom's Eating (1990), which took place during another birthday bash, contained an incredibly self-revealing scene featuring Frances Bergen, Candice Bergen's mother.

Peter, a psychotherapist, and Suzanne, a professional dominatrix, have been meeting once a week for over two years. In the privacy of a dungeon room in an S & M house, Suzanne delicately pierces, prods and ultimately soothes Peter as they engage in sensual, dominance and submission reenactments. Peter?s wife Pat knows about her husband?s other life, but there is an understanding between them; what happens in the dungeon is relegated to the world of fantasy. There are rules. Now it seems those rules are about to be broken as Peter and Suzanne, undeniably drawn to each other, agree to see each other on the outside. Though Suzanne is clearly ambivalent about any sort of physical intimacy, Peter becomes increasingly obsessed with consummating their relationship. The more Suzanne pulls away, the harder Peter finds it to let go. As they meet in coffee shops, bars and restaurants throughout New York City, Peter remembers the erotic ?scenes? between them and the relationship these fantasies have to his past. A sudden crisis in Suzanne?s life leads Peter to a meeting with Suzanne?s family where some of her own past torments are revealed. What draws Peter and Suzanne together, however, is also what pulls them apart. Even though both see the impossibility of the affair, it is Peter who suffers most when Suzanne decides to cut off contact. Whether or not this resolves the emotional and erotic issues the relationship created for both of them remains a question.

Eric Werthman has been a practicing psychotherapist for over twenty-five years. Before and during this career he has been involved in filmmaking. He worked for Walter Manley Productions for four years, is a graduate of the NYU?s ?Sight and Sound? intensive film workshop and made one short fiction film, The Scalper's Lament before making his feature film debut with Going Under.

When award-winning Korean-American filmmaker Grace Lee was growing

up in Missouri, she was the only Grace Lee she knew. But when

she later moved to New York and California, everyone she met seemed to

know "another Grace Lee." But why did they assume that all Grace Lees

were nice, dutiful, piano-playing bookworms? Pursuing the moving target of

Asian American female identity, the filmmaker plunges into a clever, highly

unscientific investigation into all those Grace Lees who break the mold -

from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school!

With wit and charm, THE GRACE LEE PROJECT puts a hilarious spin on

the eternal question "What's in a name?"

Grace Lee is an award-winning writer/director whose short films have screened at festivals all

over the world including Berlin, Tribeca, Pusan and Los Angeles. Named one of Filmmaker

Magazine's ?25 New Faces of Independent Film,? Grace received her MFA from UCLA Film

School in 2002. Her thesis film, BARRIER DEVICE, starring Sandra Oh, won a 2002 Student

Academy Award, a Directors Guild of America Student Award, LA Asian/Pacific Film Festival?s

Golden Reel Award and Urbanworld?s Grand Jury Prize, and was broadcast on the Sundance

Channel. She also directed BEST OF THE WURST, a documentary essay about Berlin today,

which has been showcased at festivals worldwide and was funded by the Medienboard Berlin

Brandenburg.