Set in the underbelly of 1980s Modesto, California, Warm Blood uses the real-life diary of a teenage runaway named Red (newcomer Haley Isaacson) returning home to find her father. In his narrative feature debut, director Rick Charnoski’s history as a skate video director informs the frenetic storytelling style, as he combines Red’s nihilist musings with a collage of documentary and B-movie meta-narratives that paint a seedy picture of life on the outskirts of town. Talk-radio bits and punk music underscore the auditory cacophony of doom, while frequent Kelly Reichardt collaborator Christopher Blauvelt (First Cow, The Bling Ring) lends his immersive, naturalist lens shooting on gritty 16mm film.

An up-close cinematic walkabout through the life of Gary Young, the original (and highly unlikely) drummer of indie rock royalty Pavement. His booze and drugs-fueled antics (on-stage handstands, gifting vegetables to fans) and haphazard production methods (accidentally helping launch the lo-fi aesthetic) were both a driving force of the band's early rise and the cause of his eventual crash landing. Leaving a wake of joy and/or destruction at every turn, Gary teeters the thin line between free-form self-expression and chaotic self-destruction. Thirty years on with scoliosis, blood clots, and a shriveled liver, Gary continued drumming with no regrets.

Sex and Broadcasting is a human, and humorous, look at New Jersey’s WFMU, a radio station that refuses any programming boundaries. Most of its disc jockeys are unpaid volunteers, working for their love of surprising, spontaneous radio. They play everything from flat-out uncategorizable strangeness to every form of rock and roll, experimental music, jazz, psychedelia, hip-hop, hand-cranked wax cylinders, gospel, Inuit marching bands, R&B, C&W, radio improvisations, spoken-word collages, and throat singers of the Lower East Side. Their captain is station manager Ken Freedman, who has spent the past three decades keeping WFMU alive, independent, and one of a kind. The film weaves personal stories of WFMU’s eccentric DJs with an exploration of the 21st-century media landscape that has made the station such a rarity.

Celebratory, shocking and raw, this film is as close to the story of the anarcho-punk band as you're going to get... Crass were an art collective and punk band that formed in Essex in 1977, and disbanded in 1984. They promoted anarchism and a movement of resistance that awakened and appealed to many. Director Brandon Spivey tells the tale of Crass's "Reality Asylum," the story and the inspiration behind the band's subversively defiant single through interviews with Crass co-founders Steve Ignorant and Penny Rimbaud, and Small Wonder record label owner Pete Stennett. 

"Compelling. Furiously combative." - Variety Married couple Jim and Lucy run a commune in the early 90's for sober living out of their suburban New Jersey home. The motley members eat, bathe and work together selling homemade "health tea" out of their van. Although there's constant bickering and plenty of fires to be put out, Jim and Lucy have managed to establish a haven for these outcasts. But the harmony is interrupted when Ann (Hannah Gross), a recovering addict and the ex-lover of one housemate, arrives. Director Nathan Silver shot this feature on a Ikegami HL-79E, a TV broadcast staple from the 1980s.

Following his acclaimed debut Ham on Rye, Tyler Taormina’s hypnotic follow-up is a midnight mosaic that reveals a suburban town steeped in alienation. It’s the middle of the night, but things are far from quiet; as the camera peers into the late-night happenings of various residents, we witness a number of them quietly escape into the dark... on rollerblades. Drawing on 1960’s European art cinema and 1990’s kid’s TV in equal measure, Happer's Comet presents striking individual vignettes that unfurl like a collective dream. Mesmerizing and meditative, the film solidifies Taormina’s gift for transforming everyday banality into uncanny cinema.

An evocative portrait of youthful possibility, The Family Jams follows Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Vetiver as they tour the USA in 2004 playing their unique music for a newly growing audience. The film is an intimate portrait of life on the road for these young musicians early in their careers, playing tiny, obscure clubs and art galleries, but on the verge of larger success before their small, intimate vans are replaced by large, impersonal tour busses. Also featuring appearances and performances by Antony and the Johnsons, Espers, Meg Baird, The Pleased and Linda Perhacs.

Chinatown Fair opened as a penny arcade in Manhattan’s Chinatown in 1944. Over the decades, it became an institution, surviving turf wars, changing tastes and the growth of home gaming. As the neighborhood gentrified this haven for a diverse, unlikely community faced its strongest challenge yet. The critically acclaimed documentary about the last hold out of old school arcade culture in New York City, The Lost Arcade, is an intimate portrait of the passionate and exceptionally diverse community at the beloved Chinatown Fair. The Lost Arcade chronicles the evolution of arcades, while celebrating the camaraderie and history of a pop culture phenomenon.

This strikingly shot concert documentary follows enigmatic Drag City singer-songwriter Bill Callahan on a two-week tour from California to New York. For the past 25 years, under both the Smog moniker and under his own name, Callahan has cultivated a legacy as both a pioneer in the lo-fi movement and one of the country’s finest troubadours. The film is built on impressionistic scenes of Callahan’s life on the road combined with his cryptic musings ("I started playing music when I was 20, and time stopped for me then in a good way”), creating a voyeuristic glimpse into his meticulously constructed universe of disaffection and disorder. It is an austere and beautiful portrait of both the musician and the multifarious American landscape.

Butch Willis is a Washington, D.C. rock legend. Born and raised in 1960s suburban Maryland, Byron Henry "Butch" Willis came of age in the late '70s post-hippie subculture. After sharing an apartment with infamous local music icon Root Boy Slim, Butch was inspired to become a rock'n'roll star himself. The unique and unusual brand of "outsider music" that Butch Willis & The Rocks created captivated the local music scene beginning with their appearance at the seminal Primitive Night in 1984. Amatuer on Plastic chronicles Butch's life and career from the beginning all the way through to present day. It features a host of Butch-appointed band managers Joe Lee (Joe’s Record Paradise), Jeff Mentges (No Trend), Jeff Krulik (Heavy Metal Parking Lot), and director Mark Robinson (Unrest/Teen-Beat). Also co-starring is Al Breon, the Rocks' innovative "throat guitarist." The film combines archival footage, interviews with Butch, and performances of his hit songs "Drugs," “The Garden’s Outside,” "TV's From Outer Space," and “The Girl's on My Mind." Amateur on Plastic also parallels the 1990’s era of seminal indie record label Teen-Beat. Behind-the-scenes glimpses of the label’s concerts and private parties provide much of the background and feature members of the bands Unrest, Versus, Tuscadero and more.

Videofilia (and Other Viral Syndromes) begins with a teenage misfit spending her first days out of school slacking, experimenting with drugs and cyberspace. She meets Junior online. He’s an aspiring amateur porn dealer, who's into conspiracy theories and is convinced that the Mayan Apocalypse is happening. Once they meet in the 'real world,' a series of bizarre events unfold in this contemporary non-love story portraying postmodern Lima as a glitchy computer virus full of corruption, psychedelia and ancient ruins.

Empty Metal follows five groups of characters, each emblematic of a different extreme political ideology, as they attempt insurrection against the status quo: a queer noise band is coerced into a dangerous assassination plot by a family of militant Native Americans who are aided by a Rastafarian computer hacker who is old friends with a Buddhist hermit whose son is a local militia leader. This tangled web of marginalized voices is as diverse and contradictory as the nation that spun it, but there is a common thread: all the characters teeter on the dull knife blade that is contemporary American politics, but they refuse to fall right or left. Instead, they lash out from the soul, and under the radar, in an attempt to achieve what their mainstream predecessors have yet to accomplish.

Cas, an academic assistant and amateur musician, moves into her aunt’s old home. In the bedroom closet, she finds a cache of mysteriously labeled microcassette tapes, containing cryptic recordings of sounds ranging from everyday objects to abstract soundscapes. Cas’s curiosity to discover the origin of these tapes leads her on a meditative journey through unknown verdant Californian landscapes, encountering experimental music performances, eccentric shop owners, and early music treasures along the way. As her adventure progresses, the mystery unravels in equally enigmatic and enlightening ways, reflecting Cas’s own evolving relation with time and sound.

Until The Light Takes Us tells the story of black metal. Part music scene and part cultural uprising, black metal rose to worldwide notoriety in the mid-nineties when a rash of suicides, murders, and church burnings accompanied the explosive artistic growth and output of a music scene that would forever redefine what heavy metal is and what it stands for to other musicians, artists and music fans world-wide. Until The Light Takes Us goes behind the highly sensationalized media reports of "Satanists running amok in Europe" to examine the complex and largely misunderstood principles and beliefs that led to this rebellion against both Christianity and modern culture. To capture this on film, directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell moved to Norway and lived with the musicians for several years, building relationships that allowed them to create a surprisingly intimate portrait of this violent, but ultimately misunderstood, movement. The result is a poignant, moving story that's as much about the idea that reality is composed of whatever the most people believe, regardless of what's actually true, as it is about a music scene that blazed a path of murder and arson across the northern sky.

Stephin Merritt's distinctive singing voice and witty lyrics about life and love make his band, the Magnetic Fields, a cultishly adored indie rock group. His decades-long friendship with Claudia Gonson, his bandmate and manager, provides fuel for his music, while his eccentric working habits contribute to his image as a singularly talented musician and writer. Interviews with fans like fantasy author Neil Gaiman and pop icon Peter Gabriel provide insight into Merritt's influential career.

Broke and desperate filmmaker Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) is a Manhattan wannabe in love with the mysterious woman next door, Angelica Peña (Jennifer Beals). He puts out an ad offering to sell his 'fabulous' movie script for $500, and gets a response from Joe (Seymour Cassel), who gives him a thousand and says he'll raise the 250,000 to make the picture. The problem is, Joe is a semi-connected wiseguy with a hemophiliac brother Skippy (Will Patton) and a habit of committing oddball crimes.

There is a place. A place where the skies are wide and the forests are thick—and strange. You can lose your­self for­ever in these woods. You’ll meet truck­ers with prob­lems and old women with strange pow­ers. You may even make a furry friend. Just be sure to stay quiet. Spend some time with a woman from Ore­gon who is lost on the road and run­ning away from her past. Now she has a chance to expe­ri­ence every­thing the grotesque North­west has to offer, whether she likes it or not.

For many, Peter Anton's house embodies an end-of-life nightmare: the utility companies long ago shut off the heat and electricity, the floorboards are rotting, and the detritus of a chaotic life is precariously stacked to the ceiling. But for the filmmakers Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden, Anton's home is a treasure trove, a startling collection of unseen and fascinating paintings, drawings, and notebooks, not to mention Anton himself, a character worthy of his own reality TV show.