Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.

For those with an open mind about what cinema can be. Jerry Garanyan, an ambulance-chasing San Francisco lawyer, is a camera buff and a dogged collector of moving images. Though his legal career is a dead end which nevertheless pays his bills, he lives for the ordinary ghosts, extraordinary shadows, and fugitive moments he has preserved forever in his personal library of 8mm celluloid. As his dearest sister reckons with losing her hearing, he is targeted for an elaborate con by smooth film world scam artists who purport to represent the "real movies."

Eccentric, bored recent widower Si Foster, a self-proclaimed eggplant connoisseur, is lonely. His daughter Sonya was kidnapped two years prior and, for reasons unknown to her, the ransom somehow wound up never being paid. As the Fourth of July approaches, he finally gets up the nerve to contact the kidnappers and pay the ransom. He is soon reunited with her...only to find that she has accepted her captors as her new family, and has grown to love them as such. Si is clueless and inept in interacting and trying to re-establish his relationship with her. But Sonya has a few tricks up her sleeve to get him to reveal why she was seemingly abandoned two years ago...with the help of some strange cargo she has brought back home with her.

Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra who has perfected his freakish steel-trap memory. As a result, however, his apartment has become an unlivable and unsanitary place. He goes out to find some cleaning supplies, only to find himself lost in a city he no longer knows. By shear happenstance, he bumps into an old friend, a world-class cut-up, who takes him to a place of importance to their past. There, Schweitzer realizes he must reconcile with the brother he has not spoken to and has refused to understand for most of his life.

Ambitious film students Jim and Laura and their nihilist, restless group of film student friends decide to adapt Macbeth and shoot it with a mostly homeless cast. Jim and his friends search for locations in abandoned buildings in Philadelphia and it's in one such building that their own story takes a very unexpected and cinematic turn.

Carla Durkow is a filmmaker from Istanbul who screens her latest work, entitled Farewell Mighty Spirit, at a Philadelphia art gallery. Her film-within-a-film details the aftermath of the death of the Grand Poet of Santa Maria, and the reading of his will.

A young woman named Emily has just arrived in New York from Pittsburgh and has recently changed her name to Chazz. Jobless, she responds to an ad involving parrot-sitting for a Manhattanite going out of town, and must weather the emotional repercussions of the humiliating thing she decides to do while cooped up house-sitting, which precipitates in her eavesdropping on the neighbors, all the while having unreciprocated conversations with the parrot.

Eddie Huntly, an east coast radio personality, moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in what the police surmise was a simple mugging gone awry. As the sullen Eddie steps in as interim host of his old friend Dean's late-night talk-radio show, he obsessively makes regular visits to the forested spot where Neil's corpse was found. One such visit unleashes a chain of unpredictable events that sends Eddie snooping into the life of a sleepwalking drifter with a mysterious past.

Max Plugin is a jaded but flamboyant relic of the 1960s. In his teens, Max ran away to California, where he met Teschlock, a charismatic ascetic and guru renowned among a small group of young followers. At that time, when Teschlock asked Max to join him and his disciples on an ashram in India, Max declined and returned home. Now, forty years later, at age 57, Max takes a journey to India to find Teschlock's grave-site, and also himself. His adventures in India, and his Castaneda-esque experiences back home, form the heart of this very unusual road movie.