The Lighthouse International Film Festival 2009

An aging Man, a bunch of flowers, the station, and the endured wait. Martin hasn't seen Grace in 30 years. As he waits anxiously, he meets a curious stranger and the story about Martin and Grace unfolds through their conversation.

Alfonso is a humble and intense old man living a solitary life in a lighthouse on the west coast of Scotland. Intelligent, with an arcane affinity to the natural world, he chronicles his knowledge, suspecting that his own fate is not far off. Far away, on a small island troubled by rising tides, a young mother entrusts her daughter to the sea and surrenders to the melting glacial ice caps. When the baby washes up on the shores of the lighthouse, Alfonso opens his heart to love, discovering an unexpected way of leaving his legacy…

Philip Silver has been a cabinet-maker in New York City for 38 years, long enough to find his craft subtly woven into the fabric of his life and marriage. When his wife reveals that not only would she like a divorce, but she would also like him to take the apartment furniture that he has made with him, Philip beings to dismantle the furniture and in the process, a symbol of his marriage that will now live in the past. The work is an intimate inquiry into the relationship between a craftsman, his work and how to interpret the process of creating and destroying an object so imbued with symbolism.

Jerry is a Marine reservist who was a young patriot and idealist when he served in the first Gulf War. But when he is called up for deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq, Jerry is a father of three; older and embittered by a life besieged by broken promises, and unfulfilled desires. Jerry returns a changed man, transformed by horrors committed that go beyond comprehension and sanity, pain inflicted that cannot be forgiven. He lives a life of poverty, his children afraid of his unexplained outbursts of rage, his wife, Nora, unsympathetic to the nosebleeds and night terrors he suffers. She hides money her sons earn from their paper route in case they need to leave. Their crowded trailer home becomes a prison. His failure as a man, his actions as a soldier, is the punishment which they share. He realizes that the respect and dignity he has spent his life trying to achieve will always elude him. When Jerry discovers that Nora has betrayed him, his anger and despair drive him to commit an act so heinous and irreversible that nothing he has experienced in combat could have prepared him for. Badland is a gut-wrenching, poignant look at the aftermath of war on a returning Iraq war veteran and his family. It is the story of a man who loses his soul and how a daughter's love and faith brings redemption to his unspeakable crimes.

On an ordinary afternoon, in a small NY apartment, a man absentmindedly crumples a scrap of foil into a ball, and peers into his opened hand. In the magnifying glass of his daydreaming mind, this ball suddenly enlarges into a ball of dizzyingly stupendous proportions! Here begins a most unusual journey. Working by himself, for himself, and for reasons he truthfully doesn’t wish to comprehend, our nameless hero (Sean Logan) sets about assembling the largest perfectly round foil ball his small city apartment can hold. As it grows and grows, he must come to grips with his shame at looting corner garbage cans, the hassles of his shrinking living space, and, inevitably, the bittersweet fact that his beautiful, enormous, all-consuming ball must end. Based on Matthew Yeager’s award winning poem of the same title (Best American Poetry 2005), “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment” is an allegorical meditation on the inspiration of limitations, self-reliance, and the emotional strains, trade-offs, and headaches that come with executing any vision – absurd as it might be. Briskly paced by voiceover narration and a drum score by world-renowned tabla master Marcus Wise, this fifteen-minute live-action short is the first film by the team at Chicken Truck Productions (Yeager, Logan, cinematographer Mateusz Broughton, art director Loui Terrier). It marks Sean Logan’s directorial debut.

When two old friends go deep sea fishing, a leisurely outing takes a dark, dangerous turn.

Paul Aufiero, a 35-year-old parking garage attendant from Staten Island, is the self-described world's biggest New York Giants fan. He lives at home with his mother, spending his off hours calling in to local sports-radio station 760 The Zone, where he rants in support of his beloved team, often against his mysterious on-air rival, Eagles fan Philadelphia Phil. His family berates him for doing nothing with his life, but they don't understand the depth of his love of the Giants or the responsibility his fandom carries. One night, Paul and his best friend Sal spot Giants star linebacker Quantrell Bishop at a gas station in their neighborhood. They impulsively follow his limo into Manhattan, to a strip club, where they hang in the background, agog at their hero. Paul cautiously decides to approach him, stepping into the rarefied air of football stardom--and things do not go as planned. The fallout of this chance encounter brings Paul's world crashing down around him as his family, the team, the media and the authorities engage in a tug of war over Paul, testing his allegiances and calling into question everything he believes in. Meanwhile, the Giants march toward a late-season showdown with the Eagles, unaware that sometimes the most brutal struggles take place far from the field of play. Following up his first filmed screenplay, THE WRESTLER, writer-director Robert Siegel once again demonstrates a unique and potent vision of the human experience, in all of its harsh truths and hopeful humanity.

Brothers in Arms tells the story of the dramatic encounter between an American G.I. and a German officer during World War II. When James Newton heads off to the front in Northern France, he leaves his heart and home behind. Through the months of service, his spirit is kept alive by the love letters he receives, but his perseverance is put to the ultimate test when his armored column is ambushed. James finds himself lost and abandoned in the frigid forests of 1944 France. James must ultimately decide whether to work cooperatively with the German soldier in order to survive in the frozen woods preceding the Battle of the Bulge, or give over to despair. Brothers in Arms is the story of two young souls serving in the Second Great War, where survival demands a friendship between enemies. The film was shot on location in Tinicum and New Britain, Pennsylvania, with battle sequences shot at the Pennsylvania National Guard Headquarters at Fort Indiantown Gap.