In 2002, Alfredo de Villa stormed the film scene with the well-received Washington Heights. He follows that success with Adrift in Manhattan, the layered story of three characters who find the courage to move past tragedy through chance encounters with strangers who break their daily routines.

Rose (Graham, in one of her best performances), an optometrist paralyzed by grief after the death of her infant, has built a wall around herself, unable to relate to her estranged husband (Baldwin) or anyone else. When an elderly patient (Chianese – ‘The Sopranos’ Uncle Junior), a painter losing his eyesight, begins to visit her office unannounced, Rose registers how alone he is, urging him to reach out and ask for help. Meanwhile Simon (Rasuk - of Raising Victor Vargas fame), a late-blooming teenager with an overbearing mother, photographs people at a distance with a borrowed long lens. One day, Rose, beautiful and melancholy in a vibrant scarf, comes into his focus. The pictures he shoots become a conduit for each of them to touch something deep within and expand their confining existence.

With intricate and believable performances by a first-rate cast, Adrift in Manhattan utilizes metaphor and a sophisticated sense of psychology to examine the subtle process of transformation and the possibilities for meaningful exchange that lie dormant in the anonymity of contemporty city life.

SCREENS WITH:

SHINER
Mike Doyle, US, 14 minutes

The lives of an elderly obesessive compulsive hoarder and an abused teenager collide on an ordinary day underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Two strangers, chained to a terrible past, change each other's lives forever.