2009, 10 mins - DoriAnn shares her husband with her biological sister. Her love for her husband is not romantic. Sex is a relious duty. Nevertheless, she's having a HELLA hard time with jealously. Raw.

Watch it now on IndiePix for $1.99 well spent. 

2010, 9 mins: I Saw You is Seattle's version of Craigslist Missed Connections. In this short lovers who have posted and answered ads tell their stories. Conclusion: some people on the internet are way, way bonkers. Some are cute and will love you forever. 

2007 - Four year old Marla sells her abstract modern art paintings for thousands of dollars. Is she a the next Jackson Pollack? Or are her parents con artists, creating art under their daughter's name? As the art world turns Marla and her family, director Amir Bar-Lev struggles with his place in telling their story. 

Watch it now on Nexflix. 

I just stumbled across California is a Place, watched all of these VERY beautifully shot shorts back to back and fell in love hard. The shorts feature skaters using empty pools in the back of foreclosed Fresno homes, Mariachi singers in LA, old ladies on a synchronized swimming team and more.

I loved Uppercut the most, it's about a real life fight club for emasculated deskbound nerds in Silicon Valley. 

2009, 13 mins: O damn. The largest shopping mall in the world isn't in Minnesota after all. It's in a remote part of China and though it's over 2x the size of the Mall of America, it only has 12 tenants. Watch it. 

2009, 4mins - LSD was the original performing enhancing drug. This short is a hilarious animated take on a legendary no-hitter thrown by a very high pitcher. 

2010, 19 mins - In Richmond, Virginia there are moped gangs who take themselves as seriously as real motorcycle gangs. This short is absurd, then funny, then scary. You should watch till the very last hyper-climactic second.

PS, it screened at Sundance and SXSW 2011.

Between 1969 and 1999 1,000 people mysteriously died in UK police custody. Filmed over five years, Injustice investigates these deaths through the stories of several mourning families futilely fighting for justice. 

In 2001 Injustice was "pulled from cinemas after legal threats from the Police Federation. but the directors have continued to put on samizdat-style screenings ever since," writes Peter Bradshaw. These filmmakers, Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood, have just released the full length film to Vimeo. 

It's a powerful documentary about the failures justice system, and the necessity of community activisim. Watch it now on Vimeo. 

2009 - An early 1990's PBS documentary made Jesco White famous for "mountain dancing." This doc goes farther and profiles the rest of his self-proclaimed "outlaw" family. The Whites are low income in one of the poorest states in America, so the film is very much about one family's way of getting by in a cycle of depression, violence, incarceration and drug abuse. Their defiance is equally hilarious and heartbreaking.

Watch it now on Netflix. 

American Juggalo, Sean Dunne, 2011, 23 mins. Juggalos, often-mocked hardcore fans of the Insane Clown Posse meet every August at The Gathering of the Juggalos in Illinois. They refer to fellow Juggalos as family; one says The Gathering is his "one week out of the year to be home."

This sounds just like the language used to describe Burning Man. Fundamentally Juggalos and Burners are quite similar. Each group has found a place to be accepted as themeslves, take drugs and drop out of their regular lives for a few days. It's anthropology. Humans like to be part of a group. 

If you watch Rich Van Every's Burning Man - Dripping in Gold 2011, 4 mins, which has no interviews but still does a great job of showing what the community is like, you'll see the differences too. There is a clear class difference between the groups. Burning Man is very much about art, The Gathering is not. And if we trust the shorts, Burning Man draws many more girls who look like models.