Magdalen

A woman, Magdalen McElhinney (Alix D. Smith), sits in a sleazy Philadelphia bar, offering herself for a price. But she's not selling sex; she's selling stories, and men and women come in and lay money down to hear her tales. One of her more demanding customers, Mr. Jones (Terry Jones) is an angry black businessman. He pays to hear the same erotic story again and again, though he's never satisfied with the way Magdalen tells it. "You have to tell people what they want to hear," he chastises. Another bar patron, Jace (Jace Gaffney), is a blocked novelist. He talks to Nathan (Nathan Hopson), a struggling actor, about his visit to Magdalen. He wasn't impressed with the story she told, about her father, an egomaniacal bisexual filmmaker named Andrew who screws over everyone, but Jace plans to incorporate Magdalen into his novel. Magdalen is also "hired" by an older gentleman (David Semonin) who claims to be a virgin, and a mysterious elderly woman (Moira Rankin), who seems to know the story before Magdalen tells it. In between her "sessions," we see Magdalen record a video diary (mostly about her troubled relationship with her arrogant, destructive filmmaker father). There's also a dream sequence in which she confronts her father (played by the filmmaker, Andrew Repasky McElhinney), the source of most of her stories, and he discusses his own confused childhood. "If you don't like my stories, change them," he tells her. Magdalen, McElhinney's first feature, was made when he was still a teenager.