120 minutes
Directed by: Scott Masterson, Seanbaker Carter, Andy McCarthy, Garth Donovan, Luke Poling, Noah Lydiard, Megan Summers, Brynmore Williams, Joan Meister, Marc Colucci, Jared Goodman, and Vladmir Minuty

World Premiere

Co-presented by Central Bank, presenting sponsor of the narrative feature films

New England Focus Film presented by LEF Foundation



This eclectic but unified collection of short stories forms both a love letter both to Boston and an impressive showcase for the area's burgeoning indie filmmaking scene. Executive producer Scott Masterson conceived an experimental collaborative project in which each film is written and directed by a different filmmaker, while all of the artists were required to contribute in some way to every other short in the project. Knowing cohesion would allow the project to shine, he devised a simple but inspired theme: each of the twelve films represents a month of the year and was shot entirely in that month. The directors simply had to capture the spirit of their month however they wished.

The result is a smorgasbord of different genres: comedy, drama, ghost story, crime melodrama, documentary, and even-quite unexpectedly-musical. Together we meet a robot-sport inventor, a young woman obsessed with following a stranger, several beekeepers, and a man who hasn't slept in two years. What holds these variety of visions together is its local flavor: TWELVE guides us from famous sightseeing spots to familiar neighborhoods, beckoning us into Boston's bookstores, bars, and candlepin bowling alleys, leading us along the Charles and down Mass Ave. Part of the fun lies in spotting the different ways each filmmaker incorporates a particular Public Garden tree and in recognizing characters from one film when they pop up in another. It is this combination of individual creation and collaborative inventiveness that makes this film both unique in itself and distinctively Bostonian.

-Kristina Aikens