S1 E1 • The Other Side

The film opens in a destitute, empty desert town in the year 2040. A radio report in Spanish gives us a glimpse of the situation: the unemployment rate is at 86 percent, gangs are running rampant, and food and water are desperately scarce. The days of mega-malls, cheeseburgers and milkshakes are a decade in the past; now only poverty and desperation remain. Jeff is a desperate father plotting his escape with his two kids, Tyler and Jenny, to the other side of the border, where there are jobs and food and wealth. They climb into the back of a commercial truck, hoping to be smuggled across, and are soon joined by a gun and drug smuggler. Things go awry when a border guard suspects the driver to be carrying more than clothes and toys. Narrowly escaping before the guard can stop the driver, the stowaways must find other means of making it across. The family trudges over steep, dry terrain toward the border fence. They dodge vigilantes who hunt for human targets along the fence. If their water or their luck dries up, they could die of exposure. As they try in vain to scale the border fence, they are spotted by another border guard. Just as they think their flight is over, the gun smuggler they met earlier rescues them and shows them a culvert that passes under the fence. They emerge safely on the other side, a land of opportunity and prosperity called ... Mexico. While a bigoted politician rails against the influx of illegal Americans entering the country and taking jobs, the kids are reunited with their mother, who had sought refuge earlier in a nearby church. Inspired by the current immigration debate in the U.S., writer-director Amyn Kaderali's film The Other Side seeks to provoke American audiences into considering a different perspective: What if we Americans were one day immigrating ourselves? Would we want to be treated the same way Latino immigrants are treated here? Kaderali hopes his film will serve as a warning to those in America who fail to realize that one day they too could be desperately crossing into another country in the hopes of a better life for themselves and their families.

Première diffusion : 8 mars 2010

S1 E2 • Seed

The year is 2022. After a decade of world famine and food riots, the Mendelian Corporation now bioengineers the world's entire commercial supply of genetically modified seeds. This comes at the expense of outlawed natural "heirloom" seeds, with their susceptibility to disease viewed as a threat to a stable food supply. The Mendelian Corporation's control of the food supply gives it great political clout, and it has used it to consolidate great power. Rural areas and farm country are now under a corporate marshal law, and the ban on "heirloom" seed has resulted in a black market, with "seed-runners" emerging to satisfy the underground market. Young boys seeking to serve their country are encouraged to join the Mendelian Corporation's Sprouts youth program. The Sprouts motto "Duty First" indicates that the security of the food supply comes above all else, and that a Sprout must remain vigilant at all times. At 12 years old, Juan (Sebastian Villada) is completely devoted to the Sprouts, and to Sprouts leader and local security chief Dick Phillips (Yul Vazquez). Under his tutelage, Juan — whose mother died in a food riot a decade earlier — routinely uses his electronic "seed-sniffer" to secretly inspect the crops on neighboring farms in search of "bad seeds." On one otherwise average day, Juan is inspecting a cornfield on the Ballard Farm when he discovers a contaminated patch. The field is burned down and the farmer is arrested. But young Juan is torn when he finds his father Mateo (Julian Acosta) in the family barn, meeting with a man he doesn't recognize. Juan suspects the two men are collaborating as underground seed-runners. Mateo is disappointed in his son's blind loyalty to the corporation, and Juan is conflicted about his suspicions regarding his father, but needs help making moral sense of this new world order. The young man struggles to juggle his alliances, and in the end, his choices may change his life forever.

S1 E3 • The Rise

The Rise is a story in the not-so-distant future about a generation letting go of the American Dream and a new generation adapting to life on the edge. John and Mary, an older couple, are selling their family home for a fraction of what they put into it. He's devastated and she mourns its loss. They wait in their empty living room, Mary boxing up a few pictures as John stares out at the wide ocean. The agent shows up and tells them potential buyers are soon to arrive. It's the only serious interest they've had and he's more than eager to close the deal. The agent tells them, "At this point you've got a five-year estimate on the property. Five could be four." The buyers, Oskar and Rika, a scrappy young couple with a baby daughter, arrive. Racially ambiguous, they are a mix of black, white, Latino, and Asian. The women instantly bond over the baby; the men are slower to warm up. After some contentious exchanges, Oskar makes an offer, and John accepts. The agent briefly warns Oskar that the market isn't getting better, and that he and his family can expect to lose electricity, gas, water, and even police protection over time. Oscar and John agree to the terms and finalize the deal by electronic Hand Scan. After the agent makes a quick exit, John and Mary say good-bye to the home, closing the door, literally, on their old life. It's a bittersweet parting for all. We join Oscar, Rika and the baby on the deck, as they look out at their new view and new world.

S1 E4 • Tia & Marco

The year is 2025. All U.S. citizens in good health are now required to serve one year in a government job, placed by lottery in to schools, soup kitchens, highways and borders. Tia Moran is six months pregnant and finishing her year as a patrol officer on the U.S.-Mexico border. Her service has taken its toll: After months of grueling work, she no longer empathizes with those who make it over the wall. "English-only" laws have prohibited government employees from learning or speaking Spanish, and far fewer Mexicans speak English, contributing to an intensified environment on the border. Tia is simply relieved that she can now return to New York City where she and her boyfriend will prepare for the birth of their son. On her last night in Arizona, Tia discovers Mexican teen Marco — cunning, charming, and speaking perfect English — hiding in her house. Waiting overnight for Border Patrol to pick him up, she is forced to consider her loyalties to closed systems as well as her own humanity. At once a cautionary tale and a story of hope, Tia and Marco investigates the complexities of immigration through one personal interaction

S1 E5 • Tent City

Tent City is set in the near future during a time of economic collapse. Unemployment is in the double digits, and block after block of businesses and homes have been foreclosed and abandoned. Only the powerful few live in homes, while the rest must survive in the tent cities cropping up everywhere. Matthew Ochoa, a renowned comic book artist in better times, has acquired a home at great personal cost: He has taken a job on a Resident Eviction Squad. Every day, he and his co-workers must forcibly evict unlucky homeowners who have fallen behind on their payments. But things aren't much better at home. His relationship with his wife Sandra has become tense. Matthew's 11-year-old son Ivan is clearly furious at him, but refuses to explain why. Despite this, Matthew persuades Ivan to play their favorite game, Trapezoid. Using three random words as building blocks, Matthew and Ivan create a science fiction tale -- a story-within-a-story -- about a hapless corporate worker who learns to his horror that he is not a human being but is, in fact, a robot created to serve the company's nefarious purposes. Tent City interweaves Matthew's life at his job with the story-within-a-story of the corporate robot. Matthew's workplace becomes increasingly untenable, and he finds himself identifying more and more with the character in his Trapezoid story. One day he must evict an elderly man who will clearly die alone in Tent City. Another day, he and his co-workers burst into a home only to find that its resident has committed suicide rather than face eviction. One night, after finishing the next chapter in the story, Matthew learns from Ivan the real reason he has been upset. Ivan admits that he is ashamed of his father's new job; that his own best friend at school was recently evicted, and Ivan has become a pariah at school due to his father's profession. Deeply affected, Matthew must grapple with a painful choice: should he stay at his job and keep his family home, or quit the job and keep his family, even if it means living in Tent City?

S1 E6 • Silver Sling

In the polarized economy of the near future, corporations offer financial incentives to their high-ranking female employees to pay for chemically accelerated surrogate births. The surrogates, for the most part, are people on the lower end of the economic spectrum — often immigrants or people looking to make their rent. Though the windfall to a woman who agrees to be an accelerated-birth surrogate is substantial, there are side effects. One can only undergo three surrogate births before becoming sterile. Silver Sling follows Lydia, a Russian immigrant in her late 20s, as she tries to decide whether or not to agree to her third surrogate pregnancy. If she does, she will be able to bring her little brother over from Russia to care for him, which she had promised her dying mother she would do. But making good on that promise will end her own dreams to have a child with her devoted boyfriend, Stephan. Lydia, motivated by her familial responsibilities, chooses to undergo a third accelerated pregnancy. As she begins the process to be accepted as a potential surrogate, Lydia meets Ana, a nurse on her first day at the Silver Sling clinic. While Lydia is gruff, hardened by her time in the U.S., Ana is kind and unassuming. But beyond their visible differences, Ana and Lydia have something in common that Lydia would never have imagined — a secret that will unite them.

S1 E7 • Plastic Bag

This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.

S1 E8 • Play

Play imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. These fully immersive games are nested inside each other like Russian dolls — each new game emerging from another and connecting backwards with increasing complexity. One moment, a player is a Japanese schoolgirl embroiled in a pillow fight with her girlfriends — and the next moment, the player has suddenly morphed into a scandalized state senator defending himself against a throng of angry reporters. Synthetic experience competes with real experience as dream, fantasy, and memory begin to collapse into each other. Identities become elastic as the players consecutively inhabit completely different genders, ages, and ethnicities. They must confront a new state of "play" where the distinction between the real and the virtual blurs and their true selves are called into doubt. A host of questions emerge: Who are the players? Who are the game designers? What is the purpose of these games? What is the point of winning? Where is it all leading? And if someone wants to stop playing, where in the hell is the escape button? Play has the structure of a puzzle, and is not meant to resolve into a single explanation or interpretation. Rather, the film is a meditation on our present day of hyperconnectivity and information overload, using videogames as the metaphor for the very human search for meaning and identity. The first collaboration between filmmaker David Kaplan (Little Red Riding Hood and Other Stories, Year of the Fish) and game designer Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab, Rules of Play), the making of Play was an exciting merging of new media with old media. The film was shot in six days, mostly in New York City, with a small crew and a large cast of local New York actors. It was produced by Atilla Salih Yucer (Three Backyards), executive produced by Rocco Caruso (Three Backyards, Judy Berlin), and shot by Michael Simmonds (Big Fan, Goodbye Solo).

S1 E9 • PIA

San Francisco, 2063. A service android brand-named PIA has replaced the majority of third tier labor in the United States. Hospital nurses, hotel workers and other maintenance driven industries all use the sleek, black-clad, human-organ powered machine to supplement their human workforce. Syama and Rakesh Raval appear on the path to a bright future together. But before they can realize their dreams, Rakesh is struck down by a sudden heart failure. Overcome with grief, Syama agrees to donate Rakesh's organs to future technology research. Two years later, a load of unregistered PIA robots bound for the black market are discovered in the cargo hold of an abandoned truck by the San Francisco police department. The PIAs are left in the evidence room overnight, where one of the units flickers on. Distorted images appear and skitter across the robot's memory screen. The android wanders out of the building and through the San Francisco night with a purpose, eventually ending up inside Syama's apartment. Startled by the intrusion, Syama grabs a weapon and intercepts the malfunctioning service android. In a tense standoff, Syama corners the PIA and interrogates it. Speaking with a fragmented memory and a fractured voice, the PIA android reveals the secret of her mysterious and sudden appearance. PIA is a futuristic love story that challenges the viewer to reconsider the meaning of humanity, relationships, and family.

S1 E10 • Mister Green

In the disturbingly near future, Venice is submerged, Canal Street in New York City has become a real canal again, and it's 87 degrees in December in Boston. Catastrophic global warming has moved from theory to fact. At the Biosphere Climate Change Expo, undersecretary for the Department of Global Warming Mason Park (Tim Kang) informs the crowd of scientists and activists that the tipping point has passed, and that they are all at fault. He tells them that the scientists of the world failed to create the necessary pressure, which would have allowed for the political changes needed to confront global warming. Now the Department of Global Warming has been defunded, drying up research money for climate initiatives. That night at the hotel bar, Park runs into Dr. Gloria Holtzer (Betty Gilpin), a former graduate school classmate, and one of the scientists who will be losing her grant money. Park blames himself for failing to prevent the climate catastrophe in time, but finds comfort in Holtzer's arms. However, she has an ulterior motive. Park awakens in the morning and soon realizes that everything has changed. Holtzer's ecotech company has developed an entirely new way to confront the challenge of catastrophic global warming — by changing the very nature of the human race itself. And Park has become a very powerful test subject. Mister Green is a parable about change — both personal and political.

S1 E11 • Fallout

A love story set against the aftermath of a nuclear attack, Fallout follows one man's journey to find the woman he left behind. It's America's worst nightmare come true, shot in live action then animated in the style of a motion-graphic-novel. A true genre blend, Fallout is part character improvisation, part apocalypse story, and part science fiction. Damien is driving the freeways of Los Angeles, fresh from breaking up with his girlfriend, Rose. Suddenly blinded by a flash of light, he crashes his car off the freeway, but stays conscious just long enough to see a mushroom cloud forming in the sky. He awakens to find himself in a makeshift refugee camp beyond the blast zone in the deserts north of Los Angeles. Unsettled by a deep guilt, Damien breaks free of the military quarantine to find Rose, the lost love of his life. His search takes him across miles of nuclear wasteland, and all the while Rose's voice rings out in his mind and heart. When Damien finally reaches the burning wreckage that is Rose's apartment, she's nowhere to be found. As it slowly dawns on Damien that he might have lost the most important person in his life, a soldier with a gun confronts Damien and takes him into custody. A nurse treats Damien for radiation exposure in an emergency medical facility set up in a church. Just when Damien has given up entirely, Rose appears on a stretcher down the hall — she's still alive! In order to save Rose now, Damien must confront his own demons of the past.