John Merriman

Sentimental Value

A group of coworkers buy a piano at a yard sale for a friend in need.

Gretchen

Gretchen has bigger problems than abysmal fashion sense: She's 17, painfully awkward and stuck in the most unforgiving place on earth - high school. When her obsession with school bad boy Ricky gets out of hand, her mother sends her to an emotional treatment center to recover. She has to travel elsewhere, however, to truly begin to understand why she fixates on the wrong kind of guy.

You Hurt My Feelings

A melancholy ex-boyfriend becomes a nanny to prove to his girlfriend that he’s ready to have children.

Pictures of Superheroes

After being dumped and fired on the same day, Marie, a maid, gets a job cleaning up after an overworked businessman and the aggressively messy roommate he’s forgotten about, sending her into a surreal world of candy, insult comics, and pretend marriages.

Pit Stop

Openly gay Ernesto and closeted Gabe grapple with the sad tribulations of being gay in a small, working-class Texas town

Dr. Meertz

A meeting in a therapist's waiting room goes horribly wrong.

Loves Her Gun

Allie moves to Texas and embraces the slower pace of life and gun culture. She tries to maintain healthy relationships as the weapons she uses to protect herself lead her to a paranoid withdrawal from life.

Flatland²: Sphereland

Set on the eve of Flatland's first mission into their 'outer-space,' the story presents the intriguing mysteries of triangles with angle sums greater than 180 degrees and flipping into dimensions that are literally out of this world.

Cinema Six

Working at a movie theater is fun, and that's why Mason, Dennis, and Gabe have done it for years. But, those years of neglecting the world outside the theater are finally catching up to them. Now, they have to make a decision: start on the long, hard path to maturity or stay at the theater, where they can avoid customers, screw with customers, and eat as much popcorn as they desire.

Gretchen & the Night Danger

An awkward teenager wrestles with whether or not to let her boyfriend go up her shirt.

What They Found

Two black men on a fishing trip stumble across the body of a dead white man and debate what to do with it.

A Country Called Home

Ellie is a 27-year old whose life is far from where she imagined it to be. Filled with annoying friends, a self-involved boyfriend, and a career that she can’t bring herself to pursue, Ellie feels detached from her life. When she learns that her estranged alcoholic father has died, her world is disrupted and she begins a journey that takes her to a small town in Texas. While dealing with the logistical arrangements of her father’s death Ellie has to confront what happens when the structures and safety nets we build for ourselves come undone.

The Ego Death of Queen Cecilia

In an effort to get back to the top, a washed-up YouTube star decides to blackmail an old high school rival. But when things go awry, she finds herself ensnared by a group of neo-nazis, trafficking drugs across the Texas / Mexico border.

Hot Air

A man fakes his death. At his funeral he discovers he has a son and attempts to find him.

Mustang Island

After his girlfriend dumps him at a New Year's Eve party, Bill and his friends drive to an off-season beach town to win her back.

Sweet Steel

A depressed man puts off an important task.

I've Got Issues

Human lives grappling with all the flavors of exstential despair intersect in a deadpan collage of comic suffering.

Sleep Study

A woman takes part in a sleep study to determine why she is not sleeping well. Winner of the Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival.

My Name Is Buttons

When perpetually disgruntled twentysomething Hunter Reeves is fired from a chain bookstore, his best chance at regaining some semblance of financial security is by offering himself to Pharmakhem, which, despite being exactly the type of pharmaceutical conglomerate Hunter is prone to despise, is paying good money for human test subjects. Along with his fellow unemployed friends Nicki and Greg, Hunter agrees to set aside his most recent Noam Chomsky book and swallow an experimental anti-depressant. Unlike Prozac, however, this drug doesn't encourage proper brain chemistry as much as it induces stupidity. Ignorance really is bliss for Hunter; while he finds himself increasingly unconcerned with the state of the world, he's also becoming progressively dumber.

Marfa Lights

When a young solar install technician is dispatched from California to West Texas, his experiences with soulful locals, visiting artists, and untethered truth-seekers searching for meaning in the mysterious Marfa lights force him to look beyond the comforting facades that surround him.

Perils in Nude Modeling

On the verge of expulsion, a hapless art student must decide between life-long ambition and love when an audacious nude model makes a dangerous demand in the middle of class.

Fuck My Son!

An X-Rated descent into demented comedy and maniacal horror, as a desperate mother drags an innocent stranger into an absurd, filthy nightmare beyond comprehension. An unflinchingly loyal adaptation of transgressive artist Johnny Ryan’s joyfully disgusting comic book. Adults only.