IFFB ’11 also screened a trio of films about what happens after the sun goes down. The two designees for this year’s festival-within-a-festival IFFBoston After Dark were The Catechism Cataclysm and Stake Land.  The former is a quirky comedy that gradually turns dark and surreal. Starting with a peppy, lonely priest using a misremembered friendship to emotionally coerce his childhood idol onto a canoe trip, we meander to a finish that includes campfire stories with two giggling panda-head...

Monday at IFFBoston 2010 brings two vastly different screenings to Somerville’s small Cinema 5.  8: The Mormon Proposition lays out the political battles surrounding the recent Proposition 8 in California.  The purpose of Prop 8 was to repeal the existing right of marriage for same-sex couples.  In the days that followed the vote on the confusingly worded text - where supporters needed to vote “no” and opponents were to vote “yes” – it became known that the Prop 8 campaign had bee...

Geralyn Pezanoski’s Mine begins with a simple premise: What happened to the pets displaced by Hurricane Katrina? Once you begin there, however, every question answered gives rise to another unanswered.  Where are they displaced to?  Where will they go once they are delivered to safety?  Who will feed them, house them, give them medical care?  Does anyone remember where this pet came from?  Or that one? Can you find the original owners?  Should you? Or are the pets better off in ne...

500 Days of Summer takes an unusual approach to a love story in that it isn’t one – and it tells you so up front.  What it is instead is an honest look at the course of a relationship when only seen from one person’s point of view, however skewed that might be.  From heart-warmingly fun and flirty, to heart-crushingly panicked and confused, anyone who has been half of a couple will relive the emotions of first dates and first fights and much of what lies between the two - and perhaps w...