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The 15th anniversary of the beloved Lower East Side Film Festival (Lesff) has a star-studded lineup. IndieWire can announce that Lesff 2025 will open with the New York premiere of Pete Ohs’ “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick” May 1. The festival will conclude May 5 with Lola Rocknrolla’s true crime documentary “The Big Johnson” about drag queen Dean Johnson.

“Our Opening and Closing Night films are proof that indie filmmaking packs a punch,” Roxy Hunt, Lesff Co-Director and CEO of Bfd Productions, said. “Pete Ohs and Lola Rocknrolla are true badass filmmakers, telling stories that are daring, original, and unapologetic. At a time when Hollywood is playing it safe and overlooking bold, visionary voices, independent film is where authentic stories have the freedom to break through. Lesff has always been about championing that spirit, and this year is no different.”

“The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick...

Micaela Diamond Set For Jenny Lester’s Directing Debut ‘Our Bodies & Other Shames’

Exclusive: Actor and producer Jenny Lester is making her directorial debut with Our Bodies & Other Shames, with Micaela Diamond among the leads. The indie flick is written by Malka Wallick, who will also star alongside Diamond (Grotesquerie), Gideon Adlon (Blockers) and Alyssa Reiner (The Diplomat). The plot follows three childhood girlfriends, who gather together for a sleepover in the Brooklyn of their youth when one is diagnosed with breast cancer and are confronted by their younger shelves for a night of memories, secrets and the meaning what it is to truly go home. Producers say Our Bodies & Other Shames “transports us to a world where friendship is the religion and The Spice Girls are the prayer.” Production has just wrapped in Brooklyn, with Girl Gang Productions, Monica Arsenault and Wallick producing. “In a time of rising and violent anti-semitism,...

"So you're mad that a bunch of people love you enough to show up and see you through something awful?" 1091 Pictures has released an official trailer for What She Said, a "feminist dark comedy" that is debuting on VOD next month. When Sam decides to drop the charges against her rapist, her friends and her siblings gather to stage a Thanksgiving intervention at her family's remote cabin where she has run off to escape. It's a "kitchen sink family drama with a black comedy heart" at its core, and the filmmakers ultimately wanted to tell "what's hopefully a very human story about a deeply nuanced and often flawed woman and her messy, misstepping, well-meaning chosen family that raillies around her." Starring Jenny Lester, Britt Michael Gordon, Paige Berkovitz, Juliana Jurenas, and Peter Evangelista. This seems like one of these films that doesn't sound like it will be that good on paper,...

The word tumah in Jewish law is the state of being impure—ritually and morally. And it seems there are many reasons why you might fall under this category as stated in the Torah’s Book of Leviticus. Touch a corpse: impure. Touch something that already touched a corpse? Impure. Touch the decaying flesh of dead animals? Impure. Give birth? Impure: but only for seven (son) and fourteen days (daughter) depending on the baby’s gender. Have an “unnatural” discharge from your genitals (including menstruation)? Yes. You guessed it. Impure. And that’s bad. Nobody wants to be impure. Look at Christians. We’ll say anything on our deathbed for absolution (purity). But today’s youth isn’t dying. To the living of any faith, purity can always come later.

Except, of course, when it can’t. Just ask anyone at the high school synagogue for young Samantha’s funeral.