Understand (2024)

The Hours

The story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.

Roberto the Canary

The death of Roberto, the canary, forces a family to come to terms with their own grief.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy who died after an ambiguous accident. His wife is crucified by her desperation to make him desire her: but he resists the affections of his wife. His reunion with his father—who is dying of cancer—jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.

The Celebration

The family of a wealthy businessman gather to celebrate his 60th birthday. During the course of the party, his eldest son presents a speech that reveals a shocking secret.

Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams

A woman and her daughter struggle to make their way through the aftermath of the Balkan war.

Insomnia

Two Los Angeles homicide detectives are dispatched to a northern town where the sun doesn't set to investigate the methodical murder of a local teen.

Mystic River

The lives of three men who were childhood friends are shattered when one of them suffers a family tragedy.

Harold and Maude

The young Harold lives in his own world of suicide-attempts and funeral visits to avoid the misery of his current family and home environment. Harold meets an 80-year-old woman named Maude who also lives in her own world yet one in which she is having the time of her life. When the two opposites meet they realize that their differences don’t matter and they become best friends and love each other.

Requiem for a Dream

The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island residents are shattered when their addictions run deep.

Alexandra

Daniel and Alexandra. A beach day. An accident… A nightmare.

Feast of Love

A meditation on love and its various incarnations, set within a community of friends in Oregon. It is described as an exploration of the magical, mysterious and sometimes painful incarnations of love.

Double Whammy

Ray Pluto has many problems. He is satirized in the tabloids as the "loser cop." His partner is starting to seem suspiciously attracted to him. A pair of screenwriters across the hall keep bugging him for help. The superintendent of his building is stabbed by hoodlums hired by his own rebellious daughter. To top it off, a sexually aggressive chiropractor may just be Ray's undoing.

Happiness

The lives of several individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts which society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.

Birth

It took Anna 10 years to recover from the death of her husband, Sean, but now she's on the verge of marrying her boyfriend, Joseph, and finally moving on. However, on the night of her engagement party, a young boy named Sean turns up, saying he is her dead husband reincarnated. At first she ignores the child, but his knowledge of her former husband's life is uncanny, leading her to believe that he might be telling the truth.

Tell No One

A man receives a mysterious e-mail appearing to be from his wife, who was murdered years earlier. As he frantically tries to find out whether she's alive, he finds himself being implicated in her death.

Champion

In the supercharged world of dirt track racing, a single mistake causes the lives of two men to change forever. One must fight for his family, the other must fight to forgive.

A Real Pain

Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.

Coyote

A distraught squatter tries to cope with his werewolf nature through drugs and music.

Reign Over Me

A man who lost his family in the September 11 attack on New York City runs into his old college roommate. Rekindling the friendship is the one thing that appears able to help the man recover from his grief.

Manic

Follows the fate of Lyle, a violent adolescent who, in lieu of prison, is placed in a juvenile mental institution, where he encounters a group of equally troubled teens. This motley crew—abused, sexually confused, violent, and yet hanging on by their grit and anger—becomes Lyle's last lifeline as he fights to find meaning in a world that seems to defy understanding.

Incendiary

A woman's life is torn apart when her husband and infant son are killed in a suicide bombing at a soccer match.

The Death King

Seven episodes, each taking place on a different day of the week, on the theme of suicide and violent death.

Pig

A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must visit Portland to find the mysterious person who stole his beloved foraging pig.

Midsummer

It is the last day of school for Christian and his younger sister Sophie. They are heading to a party at his friend Trina. High school graduation is just around the corner and after the freedom and future. But behind the idyllic facade lurks tragedy and secrets. That evening Sophie commits suicide.

Her Home

Alice, 65 years old, becomes roommate with Guy, 25 years old. After confessing to him that she’s recently widowed and incapable of going back in her own house since, Alice asks for Guy's help in facing her grief. Together, they return to her house, where memories are waiting.

Uncle Frank

In 1973, when Frank Bledsoe and his 18-year-old niece Beth take a road trip from Manhattan to Creekville, South Carolina for the family patriarch's funeral, they're unexpectedly joined by Frank's lover Walid.

Das Versprechen

Plot unavailable

Winter Vampire / Summer Humans

A Philadelphia vampire longs for warmth after wasting his summer. A 2019 University of the Arts senior animation thesis created by Nick Fulfaro.

A Winter to Remember

When we first meet Lucia she is withdrawn and isolated from her friends and family, dealing with anxiety attacks and a legion of secrets. But when she meets bright and carefree Olivia, Lucia seizes the opportunity to break out of her shell and live the life she was afraid to admit she wanted.

Another Woman

Marion is a woman who has learned to shield herself from her emotions. She rents an apartment to work undisturbed on her new book, but by some acoustic anomaly she can hear all that is said in the next apartment in which a psychiatrist holds his office. When she hears a young woman tell that she finds it harder and harder to bear her life, Marion starts to reflect on her own life. After a series of events she comes to understand how her unemotional attitude towards the people around her affected them and herself.

Claun

A famous stand-up comedian debates on whether telling or not a polemic joke he just wrote. His whole night changes when he realizes that he has lost the ability to hear laughter...

Dead Chicken

Rodrigo, a teenager staying at his father's house during vacation, is bewildered after being forced to kill a chicken for dinner, questioning the meaning of power, good, evil, and the existence of god. Feeling guilty for his acts, he discusses with his dad about the capability of taking lives away, making his mind hallucinate over the chicken scene, that tortures him along a rainy and painful night.

Portrait of a Smile

Sent spiraling after the unexpected discovery of his girlfriend's suicide, Liam sifts through the memories of their relationship that he now must reinterpret.

Carpe Dalila

Plot unavailable

Good Grief

Two sisters come together when their grandfather passes away.

Prayers for Bobby

Bobby Griffith was his mother's favorite son, the perfect all-American boy growing up under deeply religious influences in Walnut Creek, California. Bobby was also gay. Struggling with a conflict no one knew of, much less understood, Bobby finally came out to his family.

Dorm

When 12-year-old Ton transfers to an all-boys boarding school, he's taunted by his peers and terrified by their tales about the ghosts that inhabit the school. Ton is utterly miserable until he befriends a mysterious fellow pupil.

Handling the Undead

On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want?

Shrink

Unable to cope with a recent personal tragedy, LA's top celebrity shrink turns into a pothead with no concern for his appearance and a creeping sense of his inability to help his patients.

Boxcar Bertha

"Boxcar" Bertha Thompson, a transient woman in Arkansas during the violence-filled Depression of the early '30s, meets up with rabble-rousing union man "Big" Bill Shelly and the two team up to fight the corrupt railroad establishment.

The Savages

A sister and brother face the realities of familial responsibility as they begin to care for their ailing father.

In Bruges

Ray and Ken, two hit men, are in Bruges, Belgium, waiting for their next mission. While they are there they have time to think and discuss their previous assignment. When the mission is revealed to Ken, it is not what he expected.

Antibodies

When a notorious German serial killer is captured after committing some of the most heinous acts against humanity ever imaginable, a farmer and police officer from a sleepy rural community on the outskirts of Berlin is drawn into the case as he searches for the answers to a murder that has shaken his tight-knit community.

Synecdoche, New York

A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.

Little Women

With their father away as a chaplain in the Civil War, Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy grow up with their mother in somewhat reduced circumstances. They are a close family who inevitably have their squabbles and tragedies. But the bond holds even when, later, male friends start to become a part of the household.

Cherry Blossoms in March

In this mother-daughter story, a young woman explores her own mortality through art and poetry as her terminal illness holds her back from a normal life.

The Upside of Anger

After her husband runs off with his secretary, Terry Wolfmeyer is left to fend for herself -- and her four daughters. As she hits rock bottom, Terry finds a friend and drinking buddy in next-door neighbor Denny, a former baseball player. As the two grow closer, and her daughters increasingly rely on Denny, Terry starts to have reservations about where their relationship is headed.

House of Sand and Fog

Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.

The Greatest Hits

Harriet finds art imitating life when she discovers certain songs can transport her back in time – literally. While she relives the past through romantic memories of her former boyfriend, her time travelling collides with a burgeoning new love interest in the present. As she takes her journey through the hypnotic connection between music and memory, she wonders – even if she could change the past, should she?

The I Inside

When Simon awakens in the hospital after surviving a near-fatal accident, amnesia has erased the last two years from his memory. He learns that his brother was killed, he has married a woman he doesn't remember and he's haunted by strange visions of the woman he loved.

The Road Home

Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.

The View

A woman goes to the most beautiful view as she says one last goodbye to the person who meant the most to her.

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her

In California, a group of women struggle with personal problems as their paths intertwine in unexpected ways. Dr. Elaine Keener, the sole caretaker for her aging mother, turns to tarot card reader Christine for spiritual aid. Christine grapples with her own angst due to her lover's debilitating illness. Meanwhile, a bank manager deals with an unwanted pregnancy, two sisters pursue romantic interests and a housewife gets back into the dating game.

Space Mom

A grieving son turns to intergalactic postage to find closure.

The Forgotten

Telly Paretta is a grieving mother struggling to cope with the loss of her 8-year-old son. She is stunned when her psychiatrist reveals that she has created eight years of memories about a son she never had. But when she meets a man who has had a similar experience, Telly embarks on a search to prove her son's existence, and her sanity.