STEVE PHOENIX: THE UNTOLD STORY Basically a promotional video disguised as a movie, The Untold Story drops a couple of songs and interviews with local garage rockers Steve Phoenix into a low-rent Fishtown Fight Club. Philly in-jokes abound as conspiracy theorist Jack Sparks (Josh Lamon), in search of a story for his cable access show, discovers the band at the center of a radical organization replacing billboards with anti-corporate slogans. The project appears to be vocalist/songwriter Wayne Hamilton's baby, as the other members only show up for the band segments and even then seem uncomfortable. The visuals and CG effects are more attractive than usual for low-budget DV thanks to director Bill Haley's background in commercial multimedia production, but the psychedelia-tinged bar-band songs fail to reflect the narrative's subversive manifesto. --S.B. (4/9, 9:30 IH*; 4/19, 5:00 IH*)

THE OTHER AMERICA -- Mercifully less didactic than its movie-of-the-week title sug gests, the fourth feature from local mainstay Eugene Martin (Edge City) tries to weave together the stories of an aspiring actress supporting her younger sister after her mother's recent death and a graffiti tagger desperate to hide the fact that he and his mother live in a homeless shelter. In fact, the stories don't interweave so much as dance around each other, linked by too many repetitive montages that give The Other America a too-familiar feel. But the young actors, especially Irene Longshore and Tobias Segal, give heartfelt and nuanced performances; Martin's gift for taking teenagers seriously remains his greatest strength. --S.A. (4/10, 7:00 IH*; 4/12, 5:00 IH*)

ONE WEIRD ONE x 10 Ten off-kilter shorts make up FestIndies' most varied and engag ing program. The highlight is Sean McBride's "y did Yoda figt Count Duku?" which combines a toddler's words and appropriately sophisticated animation to provide the Star Wars we should have seen. Michael Reich and Jeremiah Zagar's Baby Eat Baby shows you can never watch too much Svankmajer; David Deneen's music video "Inhuman Creation Station" is marvelous Metropolis stop-motion that betters the insipid CKY song it accompanies; Waiting's Patrick Hasson makes a watchable film with Dead Broke; and Ted Passon's nifty Robot Boy gets another airing. --S.A. (4/11, 7:00 IH*)

PHILLY FILM FATALES Segregating by gender is so 20th century, but the half-dozen film makers represented bust up any notion of sameness. The highlight is Michele Grant's Broad Street Line, which marries distressed black-and-white footage of City Hall above and below ground to a bewitching Paul Robeson song. Andrea Campbell's Children in a Jar echoes the PFF's Wooden Camera with its harrowing if oddly structured exposé of South American street children and their addiction to sniffing glue, and Cheryl Hess' La Promesa offers stunning views of Cuba to go with its story of hardship and faith. --S.A. (4/12, 9:30 IH*)

THE DREAM PROGRAMME Your brain will melt at least twice: during Mark Brodzik's My name is Darren, a profile of Bensalem outsider artist Darren Finizio, whose conceptually driven "identity bands" include the weightlifting Muscle Factory, the disturbingly childlike Hoppy the Frog and the not-at-all-gay Stan and the Ass Bandits; and about five seconds into Sergio Schaedel's Sleepmusings, a breathtaking handmade animation whose characters have flowerpot feet and heads like circus peanuts. The credits say that two Bolex cameras were destroyed during filming; it was worth it. Thankfully, Kimi Takesue's Summer of the Serpent comes along to put out the fire in your mind. Lulling, hypnotic and pretty much gorgeous, it's the story of a little girl whose poolside boredom is alleviated by the arrival of a black-clad woman and her yakuza assistant. Exploring and subverting the appeal of Asiatic mystery (just wait until that brooding bodyguard drips strawberry ice cream on his black suit), it beautifully evokes the steaming daydreams of summer. -- S.A. (4/13, 9:30 IH*)

WHEN ALL ELSE IS LOST Despite the uber-shitty time slot -- do we have to lodge this complaint every year? -- this melancholy program is well worth sneaking out of work early for. Eran Preis and Ken Winikur's Bet Herut begins as a eulogy for the founder of an Israeli collective, then a protest against the collective's own death, and finally a way of coming to terms with both. Amy Olk's lovely mixed-media film Jack's Garden recalls the death of her father with a lack of sentiment but not feeling, while Jonathon Elkins' brief Bad Blood uses simple line animation to evoke the stark injustice of the Tuskegee experiment. -- S.A. (4/14, 5:00 IH*)