[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. This is the 10th anniversary of the first Nitehawk Theater Shorts Festival, spotlighting the kind of cinema brevity that doesn't always get the same attention as features. Beginning this Wednesday, the festival returns to the Nitehawks Williamsburg and Prospect Park cinemas and runs through March 5th. I love both those places, I would move in if I could. There are hundreds of submissions, and joining us now to tell us more, our Director of Programming, Cristina Cacioppo. Hi, Cristina.

Cristina Cacioppo: Hello, Alison.

Alison Stewart: As well as filmmakers, Jude Dry. Hi, Jude.

Jude Dry: Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: And Leah Shore. Hello, Leah.

Leah Shore: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Cristina, you wrote in the welcome letter in the program about last year's festival, about being intimidated heading into it, not knowing what movie-going would be like during the pandemic era. How did putting together this year's festival feel by comparison? How are you feeling this year?

Cristina Cacioppo: It's not like it felt turnkey, I definitely felt armed with the tools to make it happen. It was easier to just ease into watching the submissions. We got more submissions this year than last year, hundreds more. There was a lot more to get into, but the great thing is that like the entirety of the festival is made up of submissions, everything came from submissions, which is great. It felt really good, our team watched things and everything became pretty clear. Things fell into place and we added one more program over what we did last year, just because we had so much good stuff.

Alison Stewart: I heard you had to add an extra category. What was the extra category?

Cristina Cacioppo: We just added basically another matinee show. We don't really, we have a music-driven program, a midnight program. Then we don't really do categories, it gets you in a hole a little bit when you have to do that. We just added an extra matinee.

Alison Stewart: Right. Themes for the day?

Cristina Cacioppo: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That's what it looked on the site a little bit. What are some of the themes? Tell the folks what you concentrated on.

Cristina Cacioppo: Things end up being organic in this way where you don't want to have everything feel uniform, so I think throughout the festival, it was funny, last year we had a lot more films with that were a coming-of-age feeling, and this year we had a lot more that had more of a senior population and it just happens that way. Every program seems to have bits of that here and there. Last year we had a lot more films that were about Covid and quarantine and we saw less of that this year. I think that makes sense, so I think just the things that are on people's minds come across in the shorts that get submitted in a particular year, because we do limit it to a couple years as far as when production was.

Alison Stewart: Jude, let me bring you into the conversation. When did you first get involved with Nitehawk?

Jude Dry: I've been aware of Nitehawk much like you, Alison, a big fan of the theater. I know the Shorts festival's been going on for, is this your eighth year, Cristina? Seventh or eighth?

Cristina Cacioppo: This is the ninth. I think it's been 10 years, but we missed one with Covid.

Jude Dry: I always have loved their programming and the New York film scene is small and tight knit and I've seen a lot of people's work shown that I respect and just very happy to have been chosen for the program this year.

Alison Stewart: What's the process like on your end as a filmmaker?

Jude Dry: I've been doing the festival submission thing for the last year, year and a half. A lot of people ask me this, I think it's just a numbers game in some ways, and luckily I know a lot of people. You email around, ask what a cool festival is. There's a lot of word of mouth, "This tiny festival put me up and actually treated me really well." "This festival has really nice cash prizes if you win them or something." It's a lot, I know people have spreadsheets. I've never been that organized about it,. Yyou just submit to the festivals that you like and think are cool, and then hopefully they think the same of your work.

Alison Stewart: Leah, when you think about the strengths of the short as compared to a feature, what do you think are the strengths of a short?

Leah Shore: Oh gosh. I think it's really great for people with an ADHD attention span today with TikTok and all those social media things. I think a short film is more digestible than a feature film and I can watch like 10 of them in a row without being fatigued.

Alison Stewart: Fatigue. That's an interesting word, fatigued.

Leah Shore: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What do you mean?

Leah Shore: You don't get tired. I don't know, for me, it's hard to pay attention to something that's sometimes more than 20 minutes. It has to be interesting enough for me to keep watching [laughs]. That's why I like series as well, television. It's great.

Alison Stewart: We have a video that you shared with us. It's an animation of Cristina talking to your dad, asking him to pitch an idea for a short film. His idea is a little spicy, shall we say? So spicy that we can only play a little bit of it, actually.

Leah Shore: That's fair. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Before we play it, how does this video fit into the rest of the festival?

Cristina Cacioppo: Well here's how it happened-- I'm sorry.

Alison Stewart: Can you start, and then, Leah, you jump in.

Cristina Cacioppo: Leah had films in the festival last year, so when we were opening up submissions, I wrote to them and said, "Do you have anything new?" They said, "No," and I said, "Well, I want to think of a way to involve you." I was thinking it would be great to involve filmmakers by commissioning a work of some kind, and it could be like the festival bumper, the opening bumper. Leah and I had a bit of a back and forth, and they pitched some ideas, and eventually we arrived on this idea of talking to a family member and asking them to pitch a short. It just ended up coming down to my dad. Then Leah just did this amazing job of cutting down, because the audio was like seven minutes.

Leah Shore: Then cutting down to-

Cristina Cacioppo: I'll let you take it from here. Take it from here, Leah.

Leah Shore: Yes. It was Cristina's dad, not mine. Cut is a new word. Cut down from a 10-minute interview to two minutes, to something that makes sense, narratively.

Alison Stewart: We'll play, I think we've got about 53 seconds we figured we could play.

[laughter]

Leah Shore: That's more than what I was expecting, to be honest. Super excited.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen and we could talk about it on the other side. That's bumper. Sorry. Thanks.

Cristina Cacioppo: As part of our Shorts festival, the concept is that we're asking our family members who pitch an idea for a short film.

Speaker 5: The name of the movie that I am coming up with is The Old Man And The Pee, that's P-E-E. It's not an autobiography, fortunately. You know what the story of The Old Man And The Sea is from Ernest Hemingway. This is the old man and the pee, so it's another old man and he's having trouble with evening. Every night he goes to sleep and he gets up and he has to pee.

Alison Stewart: It gets anatomical from there, we'll say. [laughs] Cristina, what did you think when you got this from your dad?

Cristina Cacioppo: It was really shocking, it wasn't what I expected. I had basically texted him and said, "I'm going to call you and ask you to pitch a short film." He seemed to take it very seriously and he was just like, "How can it be R-rated?" As soon as I heard that, I was like, "Oh God." I think as the bumper ends with me saying, "I didn't know you were a Hemingway fan," which is also just part of it too. Pretty surprising for me.

Leah Shore: I cut out a lot of Cristina going, "Oh my God," and laughing.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the Nitehawk Shorts Fest, starts March 1st at both the Williamsburg and Prospect Park Cinemas. I'm speaking with Cristina Cacioppo, Director of Programming, as well as Leah Shore filmmaker, and Jude Dry, Filmmaker as well. Jude, let's get to your film, which is also involving a parent. It's you and your mom playing versions of yourselves. It's a bit meta because the film's a little bit about your relationship, but it's also a film about making a film. There's moments when your mom just wants to freestyle and you're like, "Hey, stick to the script." There are a lot of layers here. What's the origin of the film?

Jude Dry: My film actually is a pandemic film, but it doesn't play as such, which I'm happy about. I grew up in Vermont and in the pandemic, I spent some time there early on and I thought, my mom, has always been very funny and charismatic. I thought let's try and make something with her while I'm here. I was thinking about getting top surgery and it just seemed like a ripe topic. I like to talk about trans issues often, but I also think we tend to be a bit dogmatic, and I think it scares people. My mom is a Jewish lady, early 70s, and she's trying her best with the pronouns, but she has some opinions about it. Basically, there was this story about my first haircut that she always has told throughout my entire life. It always, to me was a symbol of the fact that even if she didn't always respect my pronouns, she knew and respected my gender identity from a very young age. That story is very illustrative of that. Framed the film around that. Then as we were shooting, she would get nervous, but then she would have ideas. The scene you mentioned is actually one day I had said, "Feel free to improvise," which a lot of directors these days say to their actors.

Then the very next day she came in, she had completely rewritten the scene, given her character a full page monologue about her childhood pediatrician. We had this fight where I'm saying, "It's too much. It's not about you. We're not talking about Nazi jokes," and it ended up being the best thing that we got. Then in the editing process, we landed on the meta aspect because it was just the funniest stuff.

Alison Stewart: Tell us the title of the film, and how you came to the title.

Jude Dry: It's called Monsieur Le Butch, and that's my mom's name that she thought of for my-- I'm giving her a haircut, like a pandemic thing. I started giving haircuts and she's talking about my haircut, and she says, "You need a name for your salon, Monsieur Le Butch," which translates to Mr. The Butch. Clearly, neither of us speak French very well.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip from the film. This is where Jude, you were talking to your mom. You're at the kitchen table talking, and we can talk about it a little bit on the other side.

Speaker 2: I'm reading this book for class, Girl, Woman, Other. It reminds me of you.

Jude Dry: Why? I'm only one of those things

Speaker 2: Other?

Jude Dry: Actually, I don't know. I guess I'm none of those things.

Speaker 2: What did you mean by, "Why, I'm only one of those things?"

Jude Dry: Because I'm not a girl or a woman.

Speaker 2: Right. Then that's natural for me to say, "So you're other?" Then you say, "No."

[music]

Speaker 2: It's not making sense.

Jude Dry: It doesn't make sense. That's the point.

Speaker 2: In your mind, what is the one thing you are?

Jude Dry: I don't know. That's the point of the movie.

Alison Stewart: What did your mom think of the movie?

Jude Dry: She really loves it. I think, and she says, "I didn't know what I was getting into," but it's gotten a lot of lovely responses. I think that's been really wonderful for her. Much like art imitating life, and the reason the meta parts work, I think, is because, to me, I'm trying to explore being seen, and what it means to be seen. She's rewriting her part because she was pushing back on my image of her as maybe someone who doesn't quite get pronouns or trans stuff. I think it really helped her to see herself through the film. She's much better about my pronouns since it came out. I think just, she looked at that and thought, "I don't want to be the kind of mom who isn't getting this right for my child even if I find it a little confusing." I think the film has helped.

Alison Stewart: We've just heard Leah, we've heard Jude about Jude and their mom, and you dealt with Cristina's dad. It's interesting that we're talking about parents a lot. In listening to the conversation, Leah, between Cristina and her dad. Then you had to edit it down and then made this great animation. What is something you noticed about father and daughter relationships, or parent and kid relationships in this era?

Leah Shore: I think the communication in my opinion is more free flowing, I guess, and open, just from hearing Cristina and her dad. I could be completely wrong with everybody else, but [laughs]

Alison Stewart: No, but there's a communication element in Jude's film as well.

Leah Shore: Yes. I guess there's just a general openness, which I really love and appreciate, especially with pronouns and everything.

Alison Stewart: Cristina, what was it about Jude's film that you thought it would be good in this lineup?

Cristina Cacioppo: It was the first film that made me cry when I was watching submissions. It was just so wonderful. They do such a great job of creating this meta thing where you feel the realness of the relationship, and then there's humor in it. There's a lot of love, and you feel this struggle. I thought it definitely encapsulates parent-child relationships, but it was so moving. Just so incredibly moving.

Alison Stewart: Leah, I have to ask you about something I saw. I think I saw it on your website. A short you did with Cardi B?

Leah Shore: Yes. I worked on a show for Billboard where we interviewed a ton of top 100 A-list celebrities, edited that down, and then added additional animation over that. I like to dabble in both. It was a crazy time. I had so much fun, and most of the time I have no idea who anybody famous is. That was also just a side fun thing like, "Cardi who?" I know who she is now.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: It made me think for that first question I asked you about the power of the short. Even though it's not in the festival, the power of the short is, you can really distill. You can get so much in a short period of time. When you have those time parameters, Cristina, sometimes you really just have to get to the point. There's not a lot of excess. You really just go straight, you're not filming, you went straight to the heart of who Cardi B is. Jude, you go straight to this moment-

Jude Dry: To the meat of it.

Alison Stewart: -with you and your mom. Yes, right to the meat of it. Cristina, if people are interested in the festival, where should they go?

Cristina Cacioppo: Nitehawkcinema.com. There are still some tickets. Some programs are sold out, but you go to the website, it should be pretty prominent to get to the festival.

Alison Stewart: Cristina Cacioppo is director of programming for Nitehawk Shorts Fest. I've been speaking also with filmmakers, Leah Shore, and Jude Dry. Thanks everybody for the preview.

Cristina: Thanks, Alison.

Jude Dry: Thanks, Alison.

Cristina Cacioppo: Thanks, Jude and Leah.

Leah Shore: Thank you.

 

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