The Rough Customer Films: Claudette, Muse, The Flusher, Roulette, Ten Steps to Better Murder, Way Far Gone (our first feature-length film), Random & Nameless: The Awesome Adventure That Never Happened (a webisode series). One of my favorite phrases is from a description for a film festival prize given to that filmmaker "whose work best communicates and encourages human values". The context of the phrasing is obvious: to arrive naturally at the ending that uplifts, conclude it positively, give us hope, show us the road back from all these horrible, horrible places in ourselves. But humans have avaricious values too, values frequently more audacious than hope. They're not easily surmounted by grace. As a society we've always preferred to get the bad news about ourselves through the pulps. I think of these films as pulp expressions of neo-noir crime and horror, mostly, inspired by the likes of Cornell Woolrich, Richard Matheson, Garth Ennis and Irvine Welsh. The characters in these stories are engaged in survival. More often than not they're struggling to survive themselves as well as take control of their environments, and not all of them succeed. What implications this is supposed to have in the large sense - if any - is for you to decide. While not always encouraging, we believe these stories communicate human values too. Not so much the ivory tower of values we imagine we have unlimited access to, but ones we've developed while negotiating with each other...