The best Kathleen Wise’s movies

Two aspiring academics and best friends take a road trip through Wisconsin to compete for the same university teaching job.

A successful house tuner provides clients with a unique form of therapy that examines subtle details in their living spaces.

Bella Vista is a fiction/documentary hybrid that tells the story of a woman at a crossroads. In the dead of winter in the mountain valley of Missoula, Montana, Doris has just returned to the U.S. after years teaching English abroad. At the local university, she forms a small community with her class of international students. But outside she is alienated, unable to form meaningful connections. Doris explores the town, coming across clues to a recent legacy of displaced persons: an old photograph of an Indian camp, a row of Japanese graves in the local cemetery. And she is haunted by a strange encounter with a boy, who lives in a motel on the edge of town. As winter begins to thaw, she and her students must consider the complexities of adapting and belonging. What if home is no longer a place, but just an idea? Could you lose yourself completely? The next decision they make will redefine not only their lives, but their very identities.

Mary plots to escape the small provincial town from which she hails, only to find her path to freedom challenged at every turn.

Flo is a 22-year-old student in New York. Living for the moment she's attracted to the neon dive bars of the East Village and the women she often picks up there. When she falls for one of her professors her world is turned on its head. Recognizing that this woman defies her usual fleeting instincts Flo puts herself on the line, risking everything for the potential of a deeper human connection.