A one-night series of eight film shorts curated by local filmmaker Vanessa Renwick, The Hunker Down to Rise Above Cinema Show aims to focus "on folks taking matters into their own hands, be it within bike culture, hobo culture, kitchen culture, or just plain ol' falling in love." Though that theme often feels like a stretch, each of these films offer their own carefully crafted aesthetic and, together, they extend a warm sense of optimism toward humanity.

Hunker Down kicks off with Gibbs Chapman's lively documentary Push Button: A History of Idleness and Ignorance, about the ways in which technology distances us from the systems and processes that we rely on every day. Composed of old footage from past decades and recent interviews shown in a video-editing interface, the assertion here is that we've all become lazy idiots by letting smart technology do everything for us. (Case in point: You'll never know which words in this article I can't spell without spell-check!)

Everything that follows is intended to go along with the theme of getting out there and doing things yourself: disabled people in Ireland make bread, regular folks kill a chicken at their apartment for dinner, a "hobo doctor" in the early 1900s treats the poor, and an aging man in India continues to edit and show film snippets in a rickety cart-theater, just like his father did.