Ecstasy
"Smuggling is an art; the craft is in your confidence" says Lloyd (Adam Sinclair), a cheeky Scottish club kid who pays for his ecstasy-fueled nights by running the odd lot of heroin from Amsterdam. But in the trance-inducing mirage of the dance floor, where hedonism can easily slide into mysticism, he discovers that love might be the best drug. Ecstasy plays its story with a light touch as Lloyd outruns the police but runs afoul of the local drug kingpin. With the stark beauty of Edinburgh as the setting, Lloyd's world is a sped-up light show whose brightest moments are suspended, if only briefly, against the flux of time.
Dark Circles
Writer-director Paul Soter touches on common anxieties in Dark Circles: fear of losing one's child to malign forces, of the dream house that turns into nightmare. A young married couple flees the city for suburbia, only to find unimagined problems in a place where the baby monitor becomes a medium of horror and a creepy vampiric figure stalks their sleep. Amidst the chilling jolts is a subtext: how imperceptible cracks between people can grow into chasms.
The Rabbi's Cat
Drawing from Arabesque mosaics for visual inspiration and based on Joann Sfar's graphic novel, The Rabbi's Cat is set in multi-ethnic Algiers between the World Wars. The rabbi is uncertain how to respond when his mischievous cat begins to speak, read from Stendhal and dispute his literal-minded exegesis of the Torah. The Rabbi's Cat is an amusing fable about communication between religions, parties, people and species.
