Edith Meeks

A trio of interweaved transgressive tales, telling a bizarre stories of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice, a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague, and the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates.

Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s, comes down with a debilitating illness with no clear diagnosis.

Mimi and Michael are close friends after a brief and unsuccessful dating interlude years before. Michael has remained in love with Mimi over the years, but Mimi, who has just broken up with her long-time boyfriend, seems willing to try romance with Michael a second time. The spark between them is kindled again, however, during a weekend picnic outing, Mimi, suddenly enthusiastic, proposes to Michael abruptly. The two marry and head off on a honeymoon to Pennsylvania without ever having slept with each other.

Interviews in the Michael Moore/"Roger and Me" tradition examine life in small-town America, class conflicts and the collapse of an upstate New York community, Dadetown, when the town's once-prosperous factory, reduced to the manufacture of paper clips and staples, finally closes. Facing massive unemployment, the blue-collar Dadetown residents next find yuppies moving into town to staff the local division of a big computer outfit.

Berenice is a meditation on a dream of lost plenitude, and its inversion into decay. The events depicted in the film concern the formation and dissolution of a utopian community in 1832, and the psychic and physical disintegration of two members of that community. In an allusion to the interiority of the main character, Berenice, whose flashbacks form the film’s narrating consciousness, the oblique and inward-turning fictive structure gives itself over to delirious visual asides. The film is partially adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. Additional primary sources used in constructing the film include texts by the 19th-century French utopian Charles Fourier and the collected letters from Brook Farm.

Evelyn Bell, a Catholic professor of theology, and her younger sister Virginia are reunited after many years when Virginia returns home in a depression after being ejected from a religious cult. At a lakeside retreat in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the sisters try to reestablish their relationship, talking about their very different systems of belief, and about the oppressive childhood that still hangs over them.

An American sergeant escapes a bloody massacre by German troops and flees into the fierce winter landscape. Wounded and seeking shelter he comes across a woman praying in a small barn. She tries to help but the German soldiers are in pursuit and closing in. What can they do?