Pieces of April

Novelist and screenwriter Peter Hedges makes his directorial debut with the comedy drama Pieces of April . Family outcast April Burns ( Katie Holmes ) lives in a beat-up apartment in New York's Lower East Side with her boyfriend, Bobby ( Derek Luke ). In order to spend some time with her dying mother, Joy ( Patricia Clarkson ), April invites her conservative suburban family to her place for a Thanksgiving feast. She discovers that her oven is broken the morning of the big day, so she goes around her tenement building trying to find a sympathetic neighbor with a working oven. Though she doesn't know them, neighbors Eugene ( Isiah Whitlock ) and Evette ( Lillias White ) offer the use of their oven, but only for an hour. While she frantically tries to complete the meal, the family drives in from Pennsylvania sharing less-than-pleasant opinions about April's lifestyle. Dad Jim ( Oliver Platt ) tries to think positively, while daughter Beth ( Alison Pill ) flaunts her good-girl status and son Timmy ( John Gallagher Jr. ) captures it all on film. Shot with digital video, Pieces of April is a project of the Independent Film Channel's InDigEnt production company. — Andrea LeVasseur