2018 Bend Film Festival

Directors/Writers: S. Cagney Gentry & Thomas Southerland

A Bulgarian immigrant and adoptive mother of a black daughter finds herself suddenly stricken with debilitating anxiety following a break-in at her home in Kentucky.

Director: Carol Brandt

When her ill mother urges her to take a vacation from her caretaking, grad-school-dropout Leigh invites her ex along on the camping trip.

Cinematography by John Barr / Directed by Mark Jackson

A French Muslim woman travels to New York City to visit her childhood best friend from the rough neighborhoods outside of Paris. When the reunion proves disastrous, Hafsia steals her friend’s credit card and identity and disappears to a remote cabin upstate. But when she discovers that she’s not alone on the property, Hafsia’s sojourn in nature gradually descends into a terrifying study of the intolerance and suspicion she encounters and reflects back to an Islamophobic America.

Directors: Alyssa Fedele & Zachary Fink

An immersive documentary that intimately follows the lives of two rescued children living in a rehabilitation shelter in Ghana, as social workers help them recover from a childhood enslaved to fishermen on Lake Volta – the largest manmade lake on Earth.

Directors: Hunter Robert Baker & Jordan Fein

A Navajo coal miner raising his secretive daughter on his own struggles with his part in the irreversible destruction of their sacred mountain.

Directors: Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer & Quinn Costello

A story about giant swamp rats invading coastal Louisiana and the defiant people on the edge of the world, who are defending their communities, culture, and livelihoods from the onslaught of this curious and unexpected invasive species.

Director: Slater Jewell-Kemker

At age 15, filmmaker Slater Jewell-Kemker began attending environmental summits, camera in hand, wide-eyed and ready to make a difference. What began with a single journey evolved into an intimate and challenging documentary shot behind the front lines of the largely unseen and misunderstood Global Youth Climate Movement.

Director: Barnaby Blackburn

An 18-year-old youth offender is trying to start his own business as a mobile mechanic. But enterprise isn’t so easy when you’re a young, black male with a criminal past.

Director: Cy Dodson

In a time when society’s belief systems are seemingly changing, or even reverting in time, one Ohio tattoo artist Billy Joe White is challenging his community by saying: “bring me your mistakes.” Beneath the Ink is a timely look at hate and racism in the western foothills of the Appalachian region that reveals heartfelt stories of change and redemption.

Director: Trevor Jimenez

Weekends is the story of a young boy shuffling between the homes of his recently divorced parents. Surreal dreamlike moments mix with the domestic realities of a broken up family in this hand-animated film set in 1980’s Toronto.

Directed by Kendall Goldberg

When struggling voice actress, Gloria, discovers her agent failed to tell her that her claim-to-fame cartoon is being remade, she sets her sights on reprising her role as the famous BioBoy.

Directed by Taylor Morden

A young woman finds out why you should never go anywhere alone.

Cinematography by Jarin Blaschke / Directed by Richard Raymond

Filmed in the area during last year’s solar eclipse and starring Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Tom Cullen (Downtown Abbey), Souls of Totality is a love story about the intensity of a looming moment that can change everything.

Directed by Skye Fitzgerald

Lifeboat showcases the crisis of refugees desperate enough to risk their lives in rubber boats leaving Libya in the middle of the night and pushing off into the unknown, despite a high probability of drowning. With few resources, but certain that civil society must intervene, a team of global volunteers risks the waves of the Mediterranean to pluck refugees from sinking rafts.

Directed by Grant Korgan & Brian Niles

An inspirational documentary about the power of never giving up. Grant Korgan is a world-class adventurer, nano-mechanics professional, and husband. On March 5, 2010, while filming a snowmobiling segment in the Sierra Nevada back country, the Lake Tahoe native burst-fractured his L1 vertebrae, and suddenly added the world of spinal cord injury recovery to his list of pursuits.

On January 17, 2012, along with two seasoned explorers, Grant attempted the insurmountable and became the first spinal cord injured athlete to literally PUSH himself nearly 100 miles (the final degree of latitude) to the most inhospitable place on the planet – the bottom of the globe, the geographic South Pole