Rob Nilsson

"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice, Luz and Ken are star-crossed lovers in screenwriter Sal's script, until their desire takes shape, inscribing itself into a movie of their own design. Risking his sanity to save the screenplay, Sal struggles to regain control of his characters and satisfy the demands of his producer Lester (legendary Velvet Underground founder John Cale), driving a wedge between the lovers with a desperate attempt to seduce Luz.

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Don tries to solve a beautiful young woman's problems.

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Tortured manchild Danny returns to his family's abandoned island retreat and finds himself beset by fantasies of deceased ancestors, former lovers and concerned friends. Frazier is Danny's enigmatic father-figure, and the man Danny's deceased mother Alicia passionately loved but could not let herself have. Both men are prisoners of their pasts; neither can abandon their passionate devotion to Alicia.

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Go Together chronicles the sinking fortunes of an Oakland art cinema. Michelle, co- owner with her husband Denny, wants to continue programming the high minded films she believes in while her husband flirts with the idea of a highly profitable “vintage porn” night promoted by St. Tre, owner of a strip club and escort service. Meantime, St. Tre’s boy friend Ben Malafide aka Aldo Modisco, on parole from prison, begins to think that life in prison is preferable to the illusory “freedoms” of life in society.

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Ben Malafide has been in prison for 20 years. His nerves are shot, his feelings shriveled. St. Tre, who runs an escort service and a strip club has taken him in. Ben feels he has nothing to offer her. She feels kinship as a fellow outsider, and loves him as a twin, a lost soul. But St. Tre has a weakness. She is a card player, and has amassed large gambling debts, mostly to Kenny Nordstrom who manages Schumacher’s gambling clubs in Northern California. Kenny is secretly in love with St. Tre but, afraid to show it, he keeps everything on a business level.

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A small band of dysfunctional renegade homeless people led by charismatic "Pan" befriends a lonely youngster, a fatherless "Bobby" who stumbles upon their homeless encampment nestled by the railroad tracks. The busy socialite mother, Barbara instantly disapproves of "Bobby" & "Pan's" budding friendship, while secretly and somewhat unwillingly developing feelings for Pan.

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A diverse group of people at a gala art gallery opening are confined to the gallery when tornadoes hit. Dramatic interactions are heightened by infidelity discovered, artistic vision corrupted, greed, and commercial banditry. Questions of what art is and how it is important to a community are explored.

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Petite struggles to hold onto her relationship with Tyrone, a pool hustler, while Jane works as a stripper in the Gold Club. Lou, Jane’s mother and a heroin addict, is a renegade aging prostitute who works the streets and bars in defiance of the pimps. Francesca manages an escort service and does phone sex.

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A young Jordanian woman from a small town outside Amman seeks greater personal and cultural freedom from a traditional family wants to attend a youth conference in Petra.

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Spoddy (Disend), a small-time car thief and master auto mechanic, hates cars and harbors contempt for most people, especially the losers of this world. Directed by Rob Nilsson, this film employs the aesthetic of Direct Action Cinema, which Nilsson developed to allow cast and crew maximum freedom to work as a jazz ensemble, improvising dialogue and action in situations articulated by the director.

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Convicted counterfeiter Ben Malafide gets out of prison after 20 years and ends up in the Tenderloin. Seeking the bare essentials to make ends meet, he confronts the Information Age, a barrage of images and noises that offer neither knowledge nor heart.

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Bid is a self-styled urban commando determined to live outside the system and the law. A hustler in high end auto parts, he is homeless by choice. All his gear in a storage locker, he plies the city on a motorcycle, counting coup on the cops. Yve is Bid’s girl friend, bi-sexual, ambitious but without direction. Neither wants to compromise… but their friendship is about to go tragic.

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A resident (Ryuki "Duke" Tenmaya) of a small Japanese island dreams of leaving his wife, heading to Tokyo and pursuing an acting career.

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Estranged from his longtime girlfriend, suburban accountant Perry wanders into the Tenderloin at night and is drawn into a series of dangerous and erotic encounters.

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Phil Berkowitz, a 55 year old North Beach poet and survivor of the days of wine and roses, has a stroke. Helpless, he lies in his flea bag hotel room in San Francisco’s Tenderloin until he is found by Johnny, his next door neighbor.

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In a futuristic desert hamlet, a ruthless town boss lynches a falsely accused Native American teen, setting the stage for revolt and a clash with a troubled, drunken sheriff.

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After learning his stepfather has throat cancer, a lazy pool hustler takes on a high-stakes contender.

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This film project was made in 1996 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cinema.

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An 80-minute documentary following John Cale and Brian Eno in Moscow, London, and Wales during the creation of the album "Words for the Dying."

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A man confronts jealously and rage as a love affair falters.

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Marty and Speed are middle-aged San Francisco cabbies who hack to support their fading dream of making it as professional actors. Perpetually down on their luck, the friends find escape and camaraderie among their fellow drivers, playing cards and telling stories of backseat conquests, until one night when a dreaded "Signal 7" (driver's call for help) comes over the wire.

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In one final attempt to achieve victory, an aging professional runner is training vigorously for a very tough marathon race.

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American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.

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The final segment of the Prairie Trilogy, about a veteran North Dakota poet and socialist organizer, who fought against economic exploitation. Finished the year before Martinson’s death, it focuses on the biography of its subject, here found in a funny and expansive mood.

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Henry Martinson accompanies a young North Dakota farmer searching for the sites of his past. The second part of John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's Prairie Trilogy.

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The bittersweet story of young lovers caught up in a political struggle waged by farmers against the grain trade, the banks, and the railroads. Set in 1915–16 North Dakota, a largely forgotten era of American history.

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The first segment of what would eventually be the Prairie Trilogy, about veteran North Dakota poet and socialist organizer Henry Martinson, who fought against economic exploitation. Martinson recounts the 1916 birth of the Socialist Nonpartisan League, his narrative accompanied by images shot by Nilsson’s own grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe.

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Four interlocking stories with a Jazz theme. Four Women go out to visit the sites of the jazz clubs where Lou, 65 and dying of cancer, claims she once performed as a young singer. It's election night, Nov. 8, 2016 and the women follow the results on their cell phones. It's also opening night for the C Flat jazz club where they end the evening up as their worst fears are realized: Trump has won the election.

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For Natia, firing bullets at her sister's head and narrowly missing is all in a days work. After taking over the family business, her sharp shooting act is the only thing keeping the declining Orbeliani Circus afloat. When a stranger and his dog drifts into her home town of Batumi, Georgia from the Black Sea, peddling his own act, Natia wonders if a change of fortune is finally on the horizon. As the circus's prospects begin to rise so do suspicions that the stranger is not who he seems. A fateful interaction forces changes upon Natia and she must leave her family to protect them from what she is becoming. Soon, she is traveling to a different city-by-the-bay, San Francisco, where confrontation and opportunity release a violent darkness rooting within her. Fighting against her loneliness and the rules of this new world, she is befriended by a troubled young artist with an innocent soul. Will this tenuous love lead her out of the darkness? Or, are they merely two halves of broken whole?

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Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.

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With David Schickele's dreamy, retro soundscape, CINE MANIFEST captures a resilient group of artists reminiscing about a time when people weren't afraid to fight for their ideals, while also creating a stirring tribute to American independent filmmaking.

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Just as sex, drugs, rock & roll, hippies, and Vietnam enter our consciousness, so it does for Ben Sweet, the shy, 18-year-old son of conservative businessman, Sy. Ben enters UC Berkeley in 1966 to avoid the draft, but finds himself smack in the middle of a home-grown revolution.

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A physics professor named Robert St. John struggles to complete his "cosmology," only to find that love must be part of any mathematical equation.

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A beautiful orphan of mysterious parentage is asked by her adoptive family to help find a husband for their niece, but when two suitors both fall for the orphan girl, the niece instigates a scheme to discredit her in the eyes of her guardians. Based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott.

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Jess Koster is a young attorney in Los Angeles, who is being stalked by the serial killer she is prosecuting.

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Rachel Burke is a criminal profiler, one of the best, actually. She, along with a sophisticated team of specialists on the FBI's Violent Crimes Task Force in Atlanta, investigates crimes throughout the country. Together, they solve the toughest of cases while trying to live their lives as best they can.

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A small boy is hurt by a horse on his father's ranch and he refuses to even be near one ever again. When a storyteller called Seven arrives with his huge imposing horse Amanda, everything changes.

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An agoraphobic psychologist and a female detective must work together to take down a serial killer who copies serial killers from the past.

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Follow the lives of a group of teenagers living in the upscale, star-studded community of Beverly Hills, California and attending the fictitious West Beverly Hills High School and, subsequently, the fictitious California University after graduation.

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A second-string pro golfer desperate for his shot at success tours the country.

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Juanita Hutchins works at Texas bar, but she aspires to be a country songwriter. When she's not looking after her impulsive daughter, Candy, or vouching for her promiscuous friend, Doris Steadman, she's trying to maintain some semblance of a romantic life. As Juanita prepares to make the leap to Nashville, her former boyfriend, Slick Henderson, returns to town, further complicating her situation.

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A man confronts jealously and rage as a love affair falters.

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The story of the Miami Police Department's vice squad and its efforts to end drug trafficking and prostitution, centered on the unlikely partnership of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs - who first meet when Tubbs is undercover in a drug cartel.

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For those with an open mind about what cinema can be. Jerry Garanyan, an ambulance-chasing San Francisco lawyer, is a camera buff and a dogged collector of moving images. Though his legal career is a dead end which nevertheless pays his bills, he lives for the ordinary ghosts, extraordinary shadows, and fugitive moments he has preserved forever in his personal library of 8mm celluloid. As his dearest sister reckons with losing her hearing, he is targeted for an elaborate con by smooth film world scam artists who purport to represent the "real movies."

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After his mom leaves him and his little brother, Aaron is forced to help his abusive step-father with his credit card scam. Set in the East Bay Area, California - this surreal coming of age story follows four young people clumsily learning how to interact with the world around them.

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Next Week in Bologna is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Italian Neo-Realism, shot in Rob Nilsson's Direct Action style. A pickpocket cinema projectionist in Bologna, Italy, narrates three intertwining stories of tourists who visit his city one summer. A timid adjunct professor from Australia receives word from a mysterious stranger about his imminent death while nervously preparing to present his paper on the classic film Last Year at Marienbad. An apostate ex-priest gifts a naive and destitute young couple with a camcorder...for possibly lecherous purposes. And, lastly, the pickpocket projectionist narrator pursues his own adventure with a lovely but understandably cautious Icelandic girl.

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"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice, Luz and Ken are star-crossed lovers in screenwriter Sal's script, until their desire takes shape, inscribing itself into a movie of their own design. Risking his sanity to save the screenplay, Sal struggles to regain control of his characters and satisfy the demands of his producer Lester (legendary Velvet Underground founder John Cale), driving a wedge between the lovers with a desperate attempt to seduce Luz.

Open details →

Don tries to solve a beautiful young woman's problems.

Open details →

Tortured manchild Danny returns to his family's abandoned island retreat and finds himself beset by fantasies of deceased ancestors, former lovers and concerned friends. Frazier is Danny's enigmatic father-figure, and the man Danny's deceased mother Alicia passionately loved but could not let herself have. Both men are prisoners of their pasts; neither can abandon their passionate devotion to Alicia.

Open details →

Bid is a self-styled urban commando determined to live outside the system and the law. A hustler in high end auto parts, he is homeless by choice. All his gear in a storage locker, he plies the city on a motorcycle, counting coup on the cops. Yve is Bid’s girl friend, bi-sexual, ambitious but without direction. Neither wants to compromise… but their friendship is about to go tragic.

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A job at Bill's Gun Shop, a permit to carry, and a chance to ride "shotgun" on a bounty-hunt seem like 23-year-old Dillon McCarthy's dream come true. When the gun kills, Dillon is forced to decide for himself: "What's the price of a permit to carry?"

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Estranged from his longtime girlfriend, suburban accountant Perry wanders into the Tenderloin at night and is drawn into a series of dangerous and erotic encounters.

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After learning his stepfather has throat cancer, a lazy pool hustler takes on a high-stakes contender.

Open details →

A man confronts jealously and rage as a love affair falters.

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Anna Reringer leaves her husband and goes to San Francisco to fulfill her dream of becoming an actress.

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Marty and Speed are middle-aged San Francisco cabbies who hack to support their fading dream of making it as professional actors. Perpetually down on their luck, the friends find escape and camaraderie among their fellow drivers, playing cards and telling stories of backseat conquests, until one night when a dreaded "Signal 7" (driver's call for help) comes over the wire.

Open details →

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.

Open details →

Henry Martinson accompanies a young North Dakota farmer searching for the sites of his past. The second part of John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's Prairie Trilogy.

Open details →

The bittersweet story of young lovers caught up in a political struggle waged by farmers against the grain trade, the banks, and the railroads. Set in 1915–16 North Dakota, a largely forgotten era of American history.

Open details →