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Something bad is happening in the house of marriage.

A brilliant doctor is on the verge of the greatest scientific advancement of our time – a cure for AIDS. But when he injects his formula into a dying young boy, who has been infected with an unknown bacterium, it is the perfect storm of nature and science. Andrew has unwittingly created an aggressive new strain of bacteria that begins to consume his body and enrage his mind with a need for human flesh.

Short film: The Return

The Jewish subject addressed in Return is, ostensibly, the Holocaust and an American Jew’s return to Germany 30 years after he left just before the outbreak of World War II. Return is, however, decidedly more than just that remarkable story. It is a story based on Fred Sondermann’s essay written in response to that trip; he needed to make sense of it. Return is Fred’s journey into understanding, of appreciating the many complexities of multiple realities, and ultimately, of believing and trusting that through this horrific and traumatizing experience, a better, more humane society can be created. Thus, this film is pertinent and significant to both Jewish audiences and to all audiences around the world, a world thoroughly familiar with upheaval and trauma.

Professor Sondermann is neither an apologist nor a revisionist; throughout his article, he alludes to the Nazi era as being “the greatest organized crime wave in all recorded history.” His and his wife’s families all suffered. But Fred does not allow his personal experience to be the only experience. While honoring the memory of his past, Fred opens himself to the very people who abandoned him before his departure, making an honest attempt to see history from their point of view. By example, Fred Sondermann courageously walks the viewer through the experience of the return, contemplating victimization, the nature of blame, the appropriate issuance of forgiveness and the determination to move forward unburdened by ghosts of the past.

Fred’s unblinking journey into the past, his amazing capacity to understand the complexities of the emotional, psychological and very physical facts of people’s lives in Nazi Germany is a lesson to all. His willingness to see beyond the “black and white” scenario of victim and persecutor, good guy and bad, speaks to the possibilities we each have in how we choose to view and label others.

And while Return is a human story, it is also a Jewish one. Fred Sondermann is a Jew who had personally experienced discrimination and persecution in Nazi Germany. Yet, he chooses to put aside the unavoidable emotions of hurt, anger and fear to try to understand the experiences of the German people. He does not ignore the reality of the horrors that the Nazis set in motion for European Jews, but makes a conscious effort to consider the era from various perspectives. Taking Fred’s broad view, Nazi Germany seems to be a collection of individuals, rather than the monolith of popular perception. This may be a difficult concept for many Jews, but Fred’s objective appraisal, in the end, brings him healing and hope.

Return takes place in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s during Fred Sondermann’s childhood, and in 1969 during his four-month sabbatical there. The 1930’s era is represented largely through archival photographs of the towns of Horn and Detmold, Germany, where Fred spent his first thirteen years. A small number of surviving family photographs are also used in this section of the documentary. Archival photographs and film footage are used to represent the growing Nazi threat, the discrimination of the Jews, and the march to war, all of which Fred experiences during these years. In addition, archival documents, including Fred Sondermann’s passport, visa, and a letter written by his father to the Nazi government protesting the Jewish boycott in Horn, are used.

In the essay Fred Sondermann wrote about his return in 1969, he expresses surprise at how little his hometown of Horn had changed in thirty years. That historic town remains largely unchanged today. This fact facilitated video and photography in 2008 and 2009 of the sites Fred sees in 1969. The historical preservation of Dachau Concentration Camp serves, as well, to re-create visuals as Fred likely experienced them. Contemporary video and photography are interchanged with archival images reflecting Fred’s memories and references to Germany’s past. Excerpts from 2008 interviews with Fred’s son, Eric Sondermann, his widow, Marion Sondermann, and childhood friend, Elizabeth Rathert, provide structure and added texture to the narrative.

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When Fred Sondermann escaped, along with his parents, from Nazi Germany in 1939, he never imagined going back there. Most of his friends and family, including his beloved grandmother, perished in the Holocaust. But in 1969, when Sondermann, a political science professor at Colorado College, was offered the opportunity to travel to Germany to lecture on American foreign policy, he said yes. For four months the Sondermann family, Fred, his wife Marion and their three children, traveled across Germany. And though Dr. Sondermann is moved by much of what he sees, including his experience at the Dachau Concentration Camp, he is most deeply affected by the return to his boyhood hometown, Horn. This documentary, a first person account adapted from Dr. Sondermann’s memoirs of the trip, walks the viewer through the experience, contemplating victimization, the nature of blame, the appropriate issuance of forgiveness, and the determination to move forward unburdened by ghosts of the past.

While Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List illuminated the previously little-known story of a German businessman who saved hundreds of Jews from the concentration camps during WWII, there were many such heroes who defied the Nazis to save countless Jews from a similar fate – chief among them the 13 diplomats whose efforts are documented in The Rescuers, the riveting documentary from Executive Producer Joyce D. Mandell and Director/Producer Michael King.

The film traces the journey of Stephanie Nyombayire, a young Rwandan anti-genocide activist who teams up with Sir Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian, to travel across 15 countries and three continents interviewing survivors and descendants of the diplomats who rescued tens of thousands of Jews from the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi death camps. While Nyombayire embarks upon this quest in an effort to uncover potential solutions for the ongoing genocide in Darfur and elsewhere, what emerges from their journey is more a testament to the ways in which the inherent good in the human spirit can trump institutional evil no matter what the circumstance.

Worst in Show is the winner of the 2011 U.S./Int’l Feature – Best Documentary

The camera is cast on the competitors in the annual “Worlds Ugliest Dog Contest,” which takes place each summer in Petaluma, CA.

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Minimum wage equals minimum effort.

Artist David Greenberger, the creator of The Duplex Planet, talks to elderly people and turns those conversations into a periodical, a CD, and a live performance.

With war raging around her, she had to make a choice: to protect the orphaned children forced into her life or abandon them and go in search of her own family. With no money or food, both choices seemed impossible. Rainbow Town is the staggering true story of Feeta Naimen and the children who call her Mother. Fueled by an original soundtrack by the children and narrated by Ma Feeta, three of the children, and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, this documentary unearths the price of war, while illustrating the strength of the human spirit. Major problems constantly face Rainbow Town, but clinging to faith and each other, Ma Feeta and her children must find a way to overcome.

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Documentary animation of Hyuck Kim, who was tortured in a prison in his native land of North Korea and succeeded in escaping to South Korea. This apolitical story tells of Kim’s life as a North Korean defector in South Korea.

NIGHT OF THE ALIEN is a clever mash up of comedy, science fiction, coming of age, psychedelics, conspiracy theories, witch craft, white trash, and pop culture.

FRAN, is an unemployed slacker, not really interested in anything other than getting stoned and hanging out. Her best friend is THE LORD OF EVIL AND DARKNESS, a guitarist who loves to jam, and is having woman trouble. These two lost souls are on a road trip through the Southern California desert, mostly for something to do, but also, to pick up a fish tank, Fran saw on craigslist. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker, who claims to be an Alien from the planet Zoltran.

This unlikely trio then encounters three stoners, who hang out all day and jam, in their band rehearsal space. The ‘alien’s’ mission is to save our planet from all the negativity that is destroying it. The plan? To take over the world, by winning American Idol.

There are also Renn-Faire geeks, a conspiracy theorist who wants to start a porn empire, an enthusiastic death metal lead singer, a stripper, an effeminate drug thug, and of course the fish tank!

This hilarious slacker, stoner, sci-fi movie, will leave you so spaced out, you’ll have to watch it again, and again!