“Futurists.” That’s how Scott and Alisha Patterson describe themselves and their artistic collective, Afro House, which launched in Baltimore in 2013.

For the past dozen years, the married creative partners—he’s a classically trained pianist and she’s a professional arts administrator—have been expanding their horizons. From hosting collaborative in-home concerts and a “100 Year Symposium” conversation series to hatching their more recent, multi-sensory, sci-fi space operas, they’ve become an embodiment of the city art scene’s DIY ethos.

Exhibit A: Cloud Nebula, their latest intergalactic odyssey, presented earlier this year at The Voxel. The three-act work fuses music, dance, theater, and film into a cosmic world of love, hope, and Black liberation. Set in a fantastical, futuristic universe, it chronicles the journey of Jakub, a celestial star in human form, as she guides survivors of her dying planet to the luminous oasis of the Cloud Nebula. Along the way, in an all-too-relatable plot line, she’s confronted by Osei, an artificial dark sun which aims to gain power by swallowing their light.

But for those who missed the shows, fear not. Recorded live, the euphoric, funk-infused soundtrack is now available as Afro House’s debut album, and they’ll be performing at Keystone Korner on November 16. Best of all, the Pattersons are only just beginning their explorations, to infinity and beyond.

Scott, you’re a classically trained pianist, while Alisha comes from a background in arts administration. Where does this desire for experimentation come from within you?

SP: I’m often confused about why there is a separation between experimentation and quote-unquote classical music. When I was in school, we studied Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Bach. They’re all innovators. But I grew up listening to and playing all different types of music. My father is a jazz bassist. We love funk. We grew up in church with gospel music. So there’s a hunger for many different sounds in me … At Afro House, we’re futurists. We’re space explorers. We want to boldly go where no one has gone before. I know that’s cheesy, but that’s really us. Musically, we’re always trying to search.

AP: And push boundaries. And not just for pushing boundaries’ sake. But driven by curiosity and always questioning the [status quo].

SP: When you stay too hard in tradition, it can become a mausoleum of what happened before. We’re very much interested in: What’s it going to look like, 100 years from now? I think that’s what it is to be human—to be able to imagine. And if you have just enough power to imagine despair, I choose hope.

Why opera?

SP: Opera can be really big. For us, we are called Afro House. We create futuristic stories about Black people. And one of the things I love about opera is that it lends itself to very gigantic ideas. And it can place Black people in these epic stories, in a way I did not see growing up.

When I was going to school in New York, I went to see Porgy and Bess [which depicts the lives of African Americans in the 1920s] at Lincoln Center. That’s one of the operas I grew up with; my father used to play the music, and the album by Miles Davis and Gil Evans. They were these really big scores, and I just loved it. I wished there was more like it. And I wanted to do that for Black people.

When did science fiction first enter your orbit?

SP: I was eight years old. My aunt took me to see Return of the Jedi. It had just come out in theaters. And it blew my mind. I fell in love with being able to go to another world. For me, film has been the biggest influence. Star Wars. Star Trek. Dune. I love those big space odysseys. And when I started thinking about, well, how can I create stories that are on that scale? Opera stuck out the most as a vehicle.

AP: We’re also raising two Black boys. So we’re thinking about, what role can we play in shaping how they see themselves in the world? How can we help to inform their sense of self by actually producing art that centers Blackness in these vast situations? And us in the future, what could that look like?

And your sons are featured in this performance and on the album—Judah, 14, plays guitar, and Ra, 11, plays saxophone. What was it like creating this together?

AP: It’s been very special to have these experiences with them. This is what we can offer them as parents, whether or not they decide to go into the arts. Like, they now know that it’s possible to do something really big that you’ve never done before. And that a community of people will come together and support that vision. I didn’t see enough of that growing up. And of course, it’s not a big deal to them, they could really care less, but…

SP: We’re old fogies and very uncool. [Laughs.]

Tell us, what is Cloud Nebula?

SP: For me, as a creator, a storyteller, it is the future, and a metaphor. The characters are us, and the task is, how do we get to that future that we know is bright?

AP: And it’s not dystopian. It’s a vibrant story of hope. The album is the same way. We want people to put it on and just be able to be nourished and filled with hope.

What inspired the album?

SP: In creating this score, we were thinking about the experience we wanted to give to people, and I wanted to give as much of myself as I can, and be a complete artist and human being. I love orchestral music, but I also like funk, rock, jazz, and soul. I’m very much influenced by Earth Wind & Fire, and one of my favorite things to listen to is their live albums. … We want to do a vinyl eventually. So that you can put that needle on and just let go.

After taking one year off, The Maryland Film Festival is making its big return May 2-5 in honor of its 25th anniversary. Throughout the weekend, Station North’s SNF Parkway Theatre will host panels, events, after-parties, gaming and tech programs, and, of course, a curated lineup of screenings that celebrate diverse filmmakers from near and far. Here are three highlights we recommend snagging tickets to:

The Hypnosis

Directed by Ernst De Geer

As The Hypnosis starts, Vera (Asta Kamma August) is facing the camera, practicing a pitch for the new women’s health app she’s building with her boyfriend, André (Herbert Nordrum). Speaking in English, although the film is mostly in Swedish, Vera tells the story of getting her first period when she was 12 and how much blood there was. She didn’t know it at the time, but she had a coagulation disorder. But because of the stigma surrounding women’s health, she was ashamed to tell anyone. The app she’s building is to educate girls like her.

An older female partner is impressed with Vera’s presentation. But André isn’t so sure. For starters, she mispronounced “definite” as “definitive,” he notes. Secondly, was her tone too heavy? No, the older woman says, it was just right. We see immediately that this is the dynamic between Vera and André. There’s love there, but he carries a noticeable sense of superiority. He’s the boss of this relationship—both in business and in life. Shortly thereafter, Vera visits a hypnotherapist to help her quit her nervous habit of smoking. But the therapist immediately sees that Vera isn’t so much anxious as unsatisfied. She feels like she’s a submissive participant in her own life. She doesn’t get to express her truest self.

The therapist says she wants to try something “radical” with her. We don’t see what exactly transpires, but the next time we see Vera, she is noticeably changed. She jumps on André’s back in a playfully exuberant way. She stands up to her imperious mother.

But when André and Vera attend “Shake Up,” a conference where would-be entrepreneurs first workshop and then make their pitch to an audience of investors, her behavior gets increasingly bizarre. At first, Julian (David Fukamachi Regnfors), the casually self-regarding coach to the investors, is impressed by her passion and outside-the-box thinking. He’s amused when she reaches across the bar and pours herself a glass of milk, as the bartender is nowhere to be found. He likes her bluntness when she calls André out for not having read a book he claims to have loved. The attendants of Shake Up see themselves as disruptors, after all—iconoclasts who are “shaking up” the system. But in Ernst De Geer’s squirm-inducing satire, the myth of this disruption only goes so far.

Soon, Vera is pretending to have an imaginary Chihuahua and really committing to the bit. Later, she dons an apron and starts serving drinks to participants. Is she joking or has she gone mad? Has she been hypnotized to act like a child, to indulge her id? Suddenly, Julian is no longer amused. For his part, André is annoyed, baffled, embarrassed. He’s a buttoned-up kind of guy. Her outbursts are the antithesis of the image he’s trying to project. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, we in the audience find her behavior cringy as well.

The Hypnosis is about what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, to borrow a phrase. Will this be the end of Vera and André’s relationship? Will she sabotage the investor pitch? And what would you do if you encountered someone like Vera in the wild?

Aint No Back to a Merry-Go-Round
Directed by Ilana Trachtman

The title is a reference to the Langston Hughes poem, “Merry-Go-Round”—the implication being, they can send Black people to the back of the bus, but there is no back of a perpetually spinning merry-go-round. This symbolism was a reality at the Glen Echo Park, just outside of D.C., in 1960. The amusement park was “whites only,” even though many Black children lived nearby.

Interviewed by Ilana Trachtman in her stirring new documentary, those Black residents, now senior citizens, still talk wistfully about hearing the happy cries of children in the pool and on the rides and feeling horribly excluded. But two events converged to finally integrate the park. Nearby Howard University started the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG…get it?) on campus. And the adjacent town of Bannockburn, a would-be utopia of liberal values and co-operative living, was founded. The residents there were largely white and Jewish, some survivors of the Holocaust, but many of them—particularly the housewives who were bored and overeducated—joined NAG in protesting the park.

The film combines video-illustration, contemporaneous documentary footage, and interviews with the surviving activists—including several Howard students who went on to become prominent civil rights leaders and the aging liberals of Bannockburn who are still fighting the good fight (one has a Black Lives Matter button pinned to her lapel)—to tells its enraging but ultimately inspiring story.

Ain’t No Back To a Merry-Go-Round reminds us the civil rights movement was full of people like this, righteous citizens who saw injustice and overcame their own differences to come together and fight it.

When Morning Comes
Directed by Kelly Fyffe-Marshall

Kelly Fyffe-Marshall’s film is a poignant look at Jamal (Djamari Roberts), a young Jamaican boy who finds out he’s being sent to live with his grandmother in Canada. His mother, Janeesha (Shaquana Wilson), a widow, loves and him wants what’s best for him—but the prospects in Jamaica are grim.

Janeesha’s boyfriend works in a coal mine. The school bully gets killed by gang-related gun violence—we see his mother sobbing in church. And yet, despite the poverty and crime, When Morning Comes is a love-letter to Jamaica.

Jamal has a happy life. He goes fishing on the boat of his best friend’s father. He plays soccer and runs races with his schoolmates. He tentatively flirts with a girl—undoubtedly his first crush—and rides on the back of a motorbike with an older friend. Everyone knows him and greets him with a cheerful “wah gwaan?” (“what’s going on?”). The people who live in Jamaica are clear-eyed about the hardships they face, but they also love their country—its “water and wood,” its cool breezes, its laid back vibes—and of course, its reggae music, which powers the soundtrack.

In one of the film’s most touching scenes, Janeesha tells her mother what Jamal can eat. He’s allergic to pork. And he really loves oatmeal and eggs and mint tea before bed. Oxtail is his favorite. She cries as she recounts these things—she’s also folding clothing into his suitcase—and her mother reassures her, in that uniquely Jamaican fashion, “You don’t have to worry, Janeesha.” Jamal is loved and therefore, we know Jamal will be okay.

Hey film fans, the MdFF is back, back, back again, May 8-12, with another great lineup. Here are some reviews to whet your appetite.

Well Groomed
4 stars

I have a theory that, assuming their basic human needs are met, everyone is obsessed with something. Maybe it’s scrapbooking. Maybe it’s yoga. Maybe it’s the whacky bedhopping antics of the cast of Vanderpump Rules. The colorful women featured in Rebecca Stern’s delightful new documentary, Well Groomed, are obsessed with dog grooming. But not just any old dog grooming, something called “Creative Grooming,” where poodles are brightly dyed and shaved into kitschy and elaborate works of art. (To give you a sense, some of the grooming concepts featured in the film include Pokemon, mermaids, dinosaurs, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.) The film focuses on four women in particular—two old pros, an up-and-coming striver, and a novice. Most of them have legit dog grooming businesses on the side. One, Angela Kumpe, gives workshops on grooming and sells non-toxic dye and stick-on gems so you, too, can “furjazzle” your pup. For these women, creative grooming is their world—an artistic outlet, a source of pride, a way to make friends, and, perhaps most importantly, a competition. Well Groomed has the structure of a Big Game movie. In this case, the Big Game is the Hershey dog grooming competition, referred to as “the Super Bowl of creative grooming.”

But even though these women are competing fiercely against each other, they love and support each other, too. After all, who else can possibly understand the source of their passion? The film gives brief voice to the naysayers—those who think it’s cruel or exploitative to paint and primp these dogs. The women insist the dogs love it—and all the wagging tails, kisses, and proud struts would suggest so. (It’s notable that even at the oh-so-snooty Westminster Dog Show, poodles—with their endlessly sculptable fur— are always subjected to elaborate grooming.) One of the groomers suggests people should take a live-and-let-live approach to her hobby and compares it to being a nudist—nudism is not for her, she notes, but she would never judge someone else who was into it. That being said, the dogs are ridiculous, especially when they’re just being dogs, and Stern has some fun showing hot pink and purple poodles in nature—standing on a craggy rock overlooking a river, romping in a barn, or tussling with other dogs in the dog park. The film has lots of deadpan jokes—“Ironically, I’m allergic to dogs,” sighs the daughter of one of our heroines—but it will also make you cheer and cry. All of this is aided tremendous by a whimsical and joyful score by Baltimore’s own Dan Deacon. Well Groomed makes you care deeply about a pastime you’ve probably never heard of and people you’ve never met. And that, folks, is what great film is all about.

Pahokee
3 stars

One of the reasons there are so many films and TV shows about high school is because the rituals have built in drama: There’s homecoming and the big game and prom, not to mention dealing with your parents and the pressure of getting into college. And no matter where you live, these rituals are more or less the same, although in some communities, they might take on more urgency than in others. In the documentary, Pahokee, set in the rural farming town of Pahokee, FL, these events take place against a backdrop of poverty and familial sacrifice. Directors Patrick Breson and Ivete Lucas essentially park their cameras in the hallways, cafeterias, playing fields, places of work, and shack-like home of their subjects, and let us watch as the year unfolds. They focus on four kids, Na’Kerria Nelson, who’s campaigning hard for homecoming queen and who just wants to get the heck out of Pahokee; Jocabed Martinez, a dutiful daughter, the school’s salutatorian, who works at her family’s taco joint and gets emotional when she reflects on all her parents have done for her; BJ Crawford, an offensive lineman on the high school’s excellent football team who wants to go to a Division I college; and Junior Walker, a talented drum major and skateboarder who is raising his one-year-old daughter on his own. In Pahokee, as is the case in many small towns, the football team is the center of community life, with the unique ability to raise the spirits of the entire town after a victory. It’s particularly fun to watch the Pahokee team play, partly because they are so good, but partly because the cheerleaders, step dancers, and marching band that support them are so wildly talented. The film is quite entertaining, and often more hopeful than sad, although at times the extreme cinema verite style can be a bit frustrating. I had questions that were never addressed: Why is BJ raising his daughter? What’s the deal with the pretty girl in the wheelchair who gets a prom invite from that handsome jock? What happened in the aftermath of an Easter Egg hunt disrupted by gunfire? (That scene, by the way, shows the fortitude of Breson and Lucas; they don’t run from the bullets but keep their cameras focused on scrambling young men and mothers frantically falling on their their children as they urge them to “get down.”) All in all, the film is an excellent portrait of a town fueled by collective dreams of living elsewhere.

The Mountain
2.5 stars

Picture an early Yorgos Lanthimos film slowed down to about half speed and you have at least a basic sense of Rick Alverson’s The Mountain. It’s a strange, idiosyncratic film, not for all tastes (certainly not for mine) but its own brand of pretentious arthouse creepiness might work on you. I will say that its visuals—painstakingly composed, mostly monochromatic images shot in desaturated whites and greys—are undeniably arresting. The film takes place in the early 1960s. Our hero is a stolid and largely taciturn young man named Andy (Tye Sheridan) who works as a Zamboni driver at the ice rink owned by his father (Udo Kier). His mother, we find out, is out of the picture, a captive patient at a mental institution.

Through a series of events I won’t spoil here, Andy ends up becoming the photographer for the courtly Dr. Wallace Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum, basically giving us Jeff Goldblum slowed down to half speed) who travels from hospital to hospital performing lobotomies. The scenes at the mental hospitals are straight from the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest playbook—lots of patients in white staring into space, howling like monkeys, or banging their heads against a wall. Of course, as we watch this play out, we worry for Andy: Will he, too, fall under Fiennes’ eager knife? This would be an absolutely chilling prospect if Andy had any sort of personality that could be lobotomized, or if the film even took a stance one way or the other on the controversial (and now outlawed) procedure. (All the characters walk around in such a trance, it’s hard to distinguish between the befores and afters.) The film really lost me by its third act when Denis Lavant (!) showed up as the father of a would-be female patient, who also becomes something of a romantic interest for Andy. By the time Lavant goes on a semi-nonsensical monologue in French about hermaphrodites (another persistent, if mystifying, recurring image in the film), I had pretty much checked out. Maybe you’ll have more patience than I did.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld
3.5 stars

Cold Case Hammarskjöld manages to perform two sleights of hand. The first is keeping me interested in a nearly 60 year old mystery about the death of the Swedish UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, whose plane crashed under suspicious circumstances in Zambia. I literally had a Venti coffee perched on my desk as I launched into the screener, but it turned out to be completely unnecessary. Director Mads Brügger—picture a cross between Louis CK and Moby—adopts a jaunty, stylized, hyper-meta tone to keep audiences engaged as he searches for the truth. But even he admits that the documentary is a bit of a lark, an opportunity for cosplay (he dresses in the white safari-style garb of his suspected supervillain), travel, and adventure. But the second half of the film takes a rather startling turn, and suddenly we’re dealing with a racist global conspiracy almost too sickening to contemplate. The film delivers a gut punch that I never saw coming.

Mike Wallace is Here
3 stars

Avi Belkin’s documentary on the notoriously pugnacious 60 Minutes interviewer starts on a curious note: It runs footage of Wallace interviewing former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. In the clip, O’Reilly essentially credits—or blames, if you prefer—Wallace with creating the kind of confrontational news interrogation that Fox specializes in. “I’m your son,” he says ominously. From there, the film chronicles Wallace’s fascinating broadcast life and uniquely brash style in a clever way, alternating between Wallace interviewing subjects—Arthur Miller, Barbra Streisand, famously the Ayatollah Khomeini—and being interviewed himself. (Once 60 Minutes became a huge hit, he was a subject of endless fascination.) While giving interviews, Wallace was direct, on-the-ball, pointed. But when the tables were turned, he hemmed and hawed, often dodging the very kinds of questions he asked himself. What emerges is a compelling portrait of a game-changing journalist, who battled personal demons (including the death of his eldest son and almost crippling depression), but never had a political agenda to promote and never shied away from the truth.

Ray & Liz
3 stars

Quiet lives of desperation are depicted with unflinching honesty in British photographer Richard Billingham’s semi-autobiographical debut film. Jumping a bit through time, he first shows us the elderly Ray (a stand-in for his own father), living in a one-room flat, wasting away in bed all day, visited only by the occasional roach and a neighbor who supplies him with jugs of alcohol. Flashing back to the early 80s, we see Ray and his chain-smoking wife Liz raising two sons in a joyless, grimy home. Little Jason, at first just a neglected toddler; later a curious and empathic little boy who loves animals, is all but ignored by his parents, who do little more than sleep, drink, and smoke. His older brother counts the days until he can leave home. The settings are vivid—dingy lace curtains, peeling wallpaper, a chest of dusty curios—and Billingham frames each ugly-beautiful scene with a keen and empathic eye. For fans of slow cinema, still photography, and social realism, Ray & Liz is as depressing as it is ultimately rewarding.

Knives and Skin
3 stars

A teenage drum majorette is missing and presumed dead, sending shockwaves through a small town. With its gallows humor, nods to surrealism, and haunting synth score, Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin draws inevitable comparisons to Twin Peaks, an obvious influence. But in some ways, this film is the antithesis of—or perhaps even a direct response to—the “dead girl in the woods” genre, as the teenage female characters here take center stage and have agency over their own lives. One sells her mother’s panties to a horny teacher; another is coming into her own as a lesbian; a third wears elaborate face paint and headpieces to school. (The fact that the two of the main three protagonists are black is simply a nice, not-fussed-over detail). The adults in the town are mostly messes, albeit some more well intentioned than others. The mother of the missing girl, the school’s choral coach, walks around in a daze and, in one disturbing scene, seduces the young man who was the last person to see her daughter. A “cool guy” teacher lures one of his pupils to his apartment. Another mother spends most of her day in bed. At times, I think the film leans too hard into the “quiet lives of desperation in suburbia” trope and the songs the chorus sings—dirge-like version of 80s New Wave hits—while undeniably cool, don’t make much thematic sense. Still, this is a feminist and refreshing take on a high school drama. Laura Palmer would approve.

Ham on Rye
3 stars

The Twilight Zone meets Dazed and Confused in this funny, unsettling film from newcomer Tylor Taormina. As the film starts, a bunch of teenagers, many dressed up as though for prom, make their way to the neighborhood sandwich joint, Monty’s. For most, the pilgrimage is filled with giddy, jangly, hormonal teenage nerves and typical high school banter, but there is a creeping dread that washes over the proceedings as well. One girl, Haley (Haley Bodell), expresses concern about where they are going. Another boy freezes up completely and has a panic attack. The camera drifts from one group to the next—a boy on crutches, a boy in a too-big suit, three girls making a point to arrive fashionably late. But why is this event happening in broad daylight? And why does the burger flipper at Monty’s look so worried? Ham on Rye’s best quality is the absolute naturalism of the kids—we really feel like we’re drifting in and out of their random, often amusing conversations. (One boy proposes a theory that “porking” is the ultimate human activity; his friend counters that emergency room doctors serve a greater purpose.) What the film is actually driving at is a little less clear, although I think Taormina is saying something the sheep-like way we adhere to systems and about teenage conformity, in particular. When you’re 16, you follow the crowd, no matter where it takes you. But FOMO, it seems, has consequences.

For showtimes and information on other films playing the fest go here!