HOLDEN ABIGAIL OSBORNE. PHOTO BY MATT BURRIn February 2009, Holden Abigail Osborne’s brother Zach was released from prison and put under house arrest. In grad school at NYU Film School, Osborne grabbed a camera and jumped on a plane to Missouri. She wouldn’t understand why she had done it until the short film the footage became was completed. “It was my form of intervention,” she says.
The result was Solitary/Release, a two-part short film that premiered at SXSW this year. Solitary is a documentary about her brother transitioning back into society while under house arrest, navigating a complex reentry into the lives of his family after serving time in prison. Release is a narrative starring James Franco as Zach and Holmes Osborne (Holden’s actual father) as Zach’s dad, who has chained him to the ground in a decrepit outdoor living space with a floor of leaves and a hot plate. Release serves as an imagined redemption, a surreal visual metaphor anchored by Franco’s slightly brutal performance.
“I wasn’t sure in the beginning that the two pieces would play together,” remembers Osborne, “but I think the pieces need each other.” Her brother was intimately involved in the process. For Zach, “the movie is heartbreaking, in that it reminds him of how powerful a challenge he faces, but also hopeful, in that it points towards the possibility of a new life.” The film will play a host of festivals around the country, but more important for Osborne is touring the film to addiction treatment centers. “One of my initial goals with the film was to start a conversation in my own family about how we could take control of an extremely difficult problem,” she says.
Osborne grew up in tiny Bates City, Mo., and studied government in college, thinking that she should focus on a stable career. On a whim, she auditioned and was cast in a play by Sam Shepard, and soon she was making films. An editor on PBS’ The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend and head producer for Wieden + Kennedy China for a year, she has one year left at NYU. Another short film and two features are under way. Without being didactic, all of them have larger issues at stake than your standard boy-meets-girl fare. “The only way that I can justify being a filmmaker is by telling stories that have a purpose, by making films that have a life beyond the screen. I think this little life we’re all trying to live can be just so excruciatingly difficult, so I make films to shine a little light; to let people know they’re not alone.” — A.V.C.
Contact: haofilms at gmail dot com; haofilms.com
The result was Solitary/Release, a two-part short film that premiered at SXSW this year. Solitary is a documentary about her brother transitioning back into society while under house arrest, navigating a complex reentry into the lives of his family after serving time in prison. Release is a narrative starring James Franco as Zach and Holmes Osborne (Holden’s actual father) as Zach’s dad, who has chained him to the ground in a decrepit outdoor living space with a floor of leaves and a hot plate. Release serves as an imagined redemption, a surreal visual metaphor anchored by Franco’s slightly brutal performance.
“I wasn’t sure in the beginning that the two pieces would play together,” remembers Osborne, “but I think the pieces need each other.” Her brother was intimately involved in the process. For Zach, “the movie is heartbreaking, in that it reminds him of how powerful a challenge he faces, but also hopeful, in that it points towards the possibility of a new life.” The film will play a host of festivals around the country, but more important for Osborne is touring the film to addiction treatment centers. “One of my initial goals with the film was to start a conversation in my own family about how we could take control of an extremely difficult problem,” she says.
Osborne grew up in tiny Bates City, Mo., and studied government in college, thinking that she should focus on a stable career. On a whim, she auditioned and was cast in a play by Sam Shepard, and soon she was making films. An editor on PBS’ The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend and head producer for Wieden + Kennedy China for a year, she has one year left at NYU. Another short film and two features are under way. Without being didactic, all of them have larger issues at stake than your standard boy-meets-girl fare. “The only way that I can justify being a filmmaker is by telling stories that have a purpose, by making films that have a life beyond the screen. I think this little life we’re all trying to live can be just so excruciatingly difficult, so I make films to shine a little light; to let people know they’re not alone.” — A.V.C.
Contact: haofilms at gmail dot com; haofilms.com
Rashaad Ernesto Green
RASHAAD ERNESTO GREEN. PHOTO BY DANIEL PATTERSONPossessor of a sneaky sort of charm that hides his utter tenaciousness, Rashaad Ernesto Green, a promising directorial talent from the Bronx, makes movies that get under your skin with what, upon reflection, seems like relative ease. His pictures, a trio of shorts and a forthcoming feature, openly seek to reveal the humanity within the taboos and faux pas of people of color. Green is clearly out to surprise us with his unusual depictions of equally unusual milieus, and he isn’t much for asking permission. “I was in a black box theater in St. Louis, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” he told me recently during preproduction for his forthcoming feature debut Gun Hill Road. “It said to view your life from the prospective of your funeral. I let it inspire me. When I sat there in the casket, looking at what others would say about me, I felt them speaking about someone who did not wait for opportunities to come my way, who took the bull by the horns and created my own path.”
Whether it’s his HBO Short Film Award winning Premature, a classically built narrative short about a Bronx teenager who, having found no support for her pregnancy from either her disaffected family and brutal community, resorts to drastic, near-tragic measures to free herself of responsibility, or his 2009 Sundance approved four-minute short Choices, a one-shot formalist wonder that stays with you well after it’s over, you get a sense with Green that he is someone who very deeply wants to say vital things through this often wanton medium. The stark impression Choices leaves you with of one young man’s ambiguous sexual encounter with his girlfriend is the product of willful attention to the most nuanced details of acting. Little surprise then that one finds that Green was a working actor for years before turning his attention to film.
The NYU Film grad counts Spike Lee, the walking film-directing brand and dean of Black Cinema himself, as a mentor, influence and friend, but he also name checks Paul Greengrass, Clint Eastwood and 2003 25 New Face Seith Mann as influences. “I respect those who have a voice, who speak up, who have something to say,” he said. His upcoming film, produced by Night Catches Us producer Ron Simons, is about “a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx whose father returns home from prison after three years to discover that his teenage son is gay/transgender, and the drama that ensues.” Look for it on the festival circuit next year. — Brandon Harris
Contact: mialmafilms.com; rashaad at mialmafilms dot com
Whether it’s his HBO Short Film Award winning Premature, a classically built narrative short about a Bronx teenager who, having found no support for her pregnancy from either her disaffected family and brutal community, resorts to drastic, near-tragic measures to free herself of responsibility, or his 2009 Sundance approved four-minute short Choices, a one-shot formalist wonder that stays with you well after it’s over, you get a sense with Green that he is someone who very deeply wants to say vital things through this often wanton medium. The stark impression Choices leaves you with of one young man’s ambiguous sexual encounter with his girlfriend is the product of willful attention to the most nuanced details of acting. Little surprise then that one finds that Green was a working actor for years before turning his attention to film.
The NYU Film grad counts Spike Lee, the walking film-directing brand and dean of Black Cinema himself, as a mentor, influence and friend, but he also name checks Paul Greengrass, Clint Eastwood and 2003 25 New Face Seith Mann as influences. “I respect those who have a voice, who speak up, who have something to say,” he said. His upcoming film, produced by Night Catches Us producer Ron Simons, is about “a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx whose father returns home from prison after three years to discover that his teenage son is gay/transgender, and the drama that ensues.” Look for it on the festival circuit next year. — Brandon Harris
Contact: mialmafilms.com; rashaad at mialmafilms dot com
Sara Colangelo
SARA COLANGELO. PHOTO BY SHLOMO GODDERSara Colangelo’s Little Accidents is one of the more arresting shorts on the festival circuit at the moment, both immediate and restrained in its tale of a woman working in a Massachusetts soda drink factory who fears that she’s become pregnant. She recruits her mentally disabled ex-boyfriend to shoplift a pregnancy test for her and bonds again with him as she struggles with what to do. “I was interested in the juxtaposition of two people, one of whom is recently disabled and trying to reintegrate himself into society and who is the stable one, and the other a woman who may be pregnant and who is spinning out of control,” Colangelo says. “And I was interested in the factory setting, which is almost a metaphor for motherhood. Through the course of the short, you slowly realize that these people have a past, and that they dated once. I’m always interested in withholding information from the audience. It becomes more interesting for them that way; it gets their wheels turning.”
For the New York City-based recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Little Accidents has traveled to numerous festivals, including Sundance and the Seattle International Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Short.
Colangelo is midway through another project, a documentary. “I heard a story on NPR one morning about this band, BILL,” Colangelo says. “The older brother is the manager, and he put his younger brother, Bill, who has Down syndrome, in as lead singer. My younger brother has Down syndrome, so their process was fascinating to me. I gave them a call and they let me spend a lot of the summer of ’08 with them, sitting in on recording sessions, following them around when they perform. I think disability is talked about a lot when people are younger and going through special needs schools, but when they’re older it feels like they’re forgotten about. They fall off the grid.”
Continuing, Colangelo says, “We have so much material. One of the film’s arcs deals with John, the older brother. He’s had musical failures, going from band to band and not having them work out. Suddenly he puts his younger brother in a band and it starts getting all of this attention. But the film is also about mortality. Bill has had two heart surgeries, and John, who wasn’t that close to him early on, worries he doesn’t have much time left with him.”
Finally, Colangelo is working on a feature script “loosely based” on Little Accidents. “It takes the same character and the same type of small American town and weaves in another storyline,” she says. “It’s similar in that it looks at trauma and its trickle-down effects.” — S.M.
Contact: Craig Kestel at WME: (310) 285-9000
For the New York City-based recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Little Accidents has traveled to numerous festivals, including Sundance and the Seattle International Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Short.
Colangelo is midway through another project, a documentary. “I heard a story on NPR one morning about this band, BILL,” Colangelo says. “The older brother is the manager, and he put his younger brother, Bill, who has Down syndrome, in as lead singer. My younger brother has Down syndrome, so their process was fascinating to me. I gave them a call and they let me spend a lot of the summer of ’08 with them, sitting in on recording sessions, following them around when they perform. I think disability is talked about a lot when people are younger and going through special needs schools, but when they’re older it feels like they’re forgotten about. They fall off the grid.”
Continuing, Colangelo says, “We have so much material. One of the film’s arcs deals with John, the older brother. He’s had musical failures, going from band to band and not having them work out. Suddenly he puts his younger brother in a band and it starts getting all of this attention. But the film is also about mortality. Bill has had two heart surgeries, and John, who wasn’t that close to him early on, worries he doesn’t have much time left with him.”
Finally, Colangelo is working on a feature script “loosely based” on Little Accidents. “It takes the same character and the same type of small American town and weaves in another storyline,” she says. “It’s similar in that it looks at trauma and its trickle-down effects.” — S.M.
Contact: Craig Kestel at WME: (310) 285-9000
Julius Onah
JULIUS ONAH. PHOTO BY RICHARD KOEKWriter-director Julius Onah describes his debut feature, The Girl Is In Trouble, shooting this summer on the streets of New York City, as a film that takes “the various archetypes of film noir and marries them to the diversity of the Lower East Side.” There’s a European femme fatale, a downtown denizen in over his head, a murder victim, a few thugs and, of course, a setting steeped in the history of Gotham’s immigrant culture. Explaining the appeal of his setting, Onah, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in the Philippines and Arlington, Va., says, “The Lower East Side was a meeting point for freed African-American slaves and the destination for German immigrants, Dominican immigrants and many others. I’m from an immigrant family myself and am attracted in all my work to stories that will resonate internationally, in different cultures.”
In addition to having researched the history of the Lower East Side — recalling the work of Richard Price, Onah’s script weaves bits of that history throughout its narrative — Onah knows the neighborhood firsthand because he lives there and has worked in its club scene. Quite organically, then, he has given his project a transmedia element. “I have a lot of friends who d.j. and promote [parties],” he says. “I’ve written some of these real people, like Nicky Digital, into the movie and made them part of the story. They’ll run little bits of viral footage on their photo blogs. On top of that, the film is told in 10 chapters — I liken it to a music album. Each chapter is a song, its own experience. We may leak one of our chapters [online as a promotion].”
Of course, those 10 10-minute chapters are the perfect length for other forms of distribution, as the Wesleyan University theater-program graduate is well aware. His previous films include shorts shot on and for mobile phones, like Goodbye Chicken, Farewell Goat, which premiered this summer at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Other shorts include The Boundary, a border-crossing thriller selected by Amnesty International as one of its “Movies that Matter,” and the Berlin-premiering doc short Szmolinsky.
Among his many jobs and positions — Onah has done everything from the Tribeca All Access program to the Berlin Talent Campus to the obligatory gig at Kim’s Video — interned with Spike Lee, who has since come on board The Girl Is In Trouble as an executive producer. Onah, who is still attending the Graduate Film Program at NYU (The Girl Is In Trouble is actually his thesis film), developed the script in weekly meetings with Lee, who is a professor there. “But it wasn’t until I could articulate to him how I could make the film on not just a creative level but a technical and production one that he came on board,” Onah says. Lee’s name helped raise finance and attract cast, Onah says, “but mostly it was just a lot of hunger. People responded to the script and my shorts, which reflect my ability to tell a story with any number of resources, from a 35mm rig to a cell phone.” — S.M.
Contact: juliusonah.com
SEAN DURKIN. PHOTO BY RICHARD KOEK
In addition to having researched the history of the Lower East Side — recalling the work of Richard Price, Onah’s script weaves bits of that history throughout its narrative — Onah knows the neighborhood firsthand because he lives there and has worked in its club scene. Quite organically, then, he has given his project a transmedia element. “I have a lot of friends who d.j. and promote [parties],” he says. “I’ve written some of these real people, like Nicky Digital, into the movie and made them part of the story. They’ll run little bits of viral footage on their photo blogs. On top of that, the film is told in 10 chapters — I liken it to a music album. Each chapter is a song, its own experience. We may leak one of our chapters [online as a promotion].”
Of course, those 10 10-minute chapters are the perfect length for other forms of distribution, as the Wesleyan University theater-program graduate is well aware. His previous films include shorts shot on and for mobile phones, like Goodbye Chicken, Farewell Goat, which premiered this summer at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Other shorts include The Boundary, a border-crossing thriller selected by Amnesty International as one of its “Movies that Matter,” and the Berlin-premiering doc short Szmolinsky.
Among his many jobs and positions — Onah has done everything from the Tribeca All Access program to the Berlin Talent Campus to the obligatory gig at Kim’s Video — interned with Spike Lee, who has since come on board The Girl Is In Trouble as an executive producer. Onah, who is still attending the Graduate Film Program at NYU (The Girl Is In Trouble is actually his thesis film), developed the script in weekly meetings with Lee, who is a professor there. “But it wasn’t until I could articulate to him how I could make the film on not just a creative level but a technical and production one that he came on board,” Onah says. Lee’s name helped raise finance and attract cast, Onah says, “but mostly it was just a lot of hunger. People responded to the script and my shorts, which reflect my ability to tell a story with any number of resources, from a 35mm rig to a cell phone.” — S.M.
Contact: juliusonah.com
Seth Durkin
SEAN DURKIN. PHOTO BY RICHARD KOEK“As a child I built this irrational fear of home invasion,” Durkin, 28, recalls. “All of these unsolved mysteries seemed to always happen in Southern California, so for a kid watching in England it looked like Southern California was the scariest place on Earth.”
His fear later turned into a driving fascination with one of Southern California’s most infamous home invasions, the Sharon Tate murders, and the people responsible, the Manson family. His interest didn’t fade when he began attending NYU in 2002 to become a filmmaker. “I didn’t want to do something on the Manson family, but I wanted to make a film about lost people trying to find their place who get manipulated beyond their control.” And while Durkin has been busy producing and running the production company Borderline Films with fellow NYU classmates Josh Mond and Antonio Campos (they’re responsible for Buy It Now and Afterschool, both directed by Campos, as well as Alistair Banks Griffin’s Two Gates of Sleep), he has continued to research cults. Finally, last year he began moving forward. But with financing not yet in place and the screenplay still not to his liking, Durkin postponed his debut feature and decided instead to make the short Mary Last Seen.
The 12-minute short explores the initiation a person unwittingly goes through before they are introduced into a cult. Durkin highlights this through the story of Mary (Alexia Rasmussen) and her boyfriend (Brady Corbet) as they take a drive into the woods of upstate New York. After a string of bizarre incidents, they show up on a farm where Mary is welcomed with open arms. When the boyfriend leaves, we realize that Mary has been inducted into a cult — or, as the open ending leaves us free to imagine, worse.
“I made Mary Last Seen to have something to send out with the feature script,” Durkin admits. But after taking a second pass at the edit he decided to submit it to Sundance, which accepted the film. It went on to play the 2010 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where it won the section’s short film prize. Festivalgoers have raved about the short’s creepy ambiguity and beautiful camerawork, which includes a gorgeous shot of Mary and her boyfriend jumping off a highway overpass, the camera’s POV taken from the water’s surface where they land. “It’s so gratifying,” says Durkin of the reaction. “At times you’re broke and you ask yourself what it’s all for and then something like this happens. It’s inspiring.”
Durkin is now focused back on the feature, titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, which he’s working on at this year’s Sundance Labs. The film returns to the farm shown in Mary Last Seen, but follows another young girl, Martha, who after escaping lives with her sister though she’s still haunted by memories of her time there. (Ted Hope has signed on to executive produce.) “I want the story to be grounded in this family drama, which I think everyone can relate to, but also get into these subjective paranoid aspects from her past, which audiences aren’t used to seeing.” — Jason Guerrasio
Contact: Melissa Breaux at Washington Square Arts: (323) 850-2782; David Flynn at UTA: (310) 273-6700
Zac Stuart-Pontier
ZAC STUART-PONTIER. PHOTO BY MARC SMERLING“The reception of Catfish was a trip,” says Stuart-Pontier. “Working on it for years, you become desensitized to the story, so when people have a reaction like that, it’s just amazing.” As his edits have progressed, Stuart-Pontier has consistently taken on a bigger role in his productions, earning himself co-producer credits on both Catfish and Beautiful Darling. He has also been an assistant director, chiefly on Cannes selections Afterschool (directed by Antonio Campos) and Two Gates of Sleep (directed by Alistair Banks Griffin), but also on some of the same commercials and music videos that he edits. “That’s perfect, because I can be on set and say, ‘Guys, I’m never gonna use this shot. Let’s cut it.’” Stuart-Pontier says he has a difficult time sitting back when there’s work to be done. “It’s hard for me to stop working on something; it feels like admitting defeat. It feels like, ‘I wasn’t able to solve this problem.’”
Growing up in Narrowsburg, N.Y., his parents ran the local newspaper together, which is where he was first bit with the story bug “learning to write news, what information you give first, how you introduce the characters.” He writes a weekly column for the River Reporter about his life, begun during college at the behest of his mother, and credits it with keeping his creative brain turned on while focused so intently on other people’s projects.
“I love documentaries — I enjoy having to find that and the process of pulling out what the story is. What I’ve learned the most is not to try to force anything. Shaping the story around what is there is much more powerful than trying to mold the footage into your preconceived idea.” — Alicia Van Couvering
Contact: Mira Yong at Gersh: (212) 634-8157
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
good job in doing those short films. continue doing it. it can be a good help for you in the future.
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