Santino Fontana, Sarah Miles, and Julie Halston are each familiar to both theater lovers and filmgoers, so it feels fitting that they would be performing together in one of the thirty-four entries in something called the “NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival,” which is celebrating its eighth season this weekend at a new venue, A.R.T./New York Theatres.
Fontana plays a magician named Billy who answers an emergency call from his sister, a botanist named Brenda (Miles), who opens her door with the greeting: “I killed her. I killed my mother.” This combination comedy and horror film gets wilder from there. Entitled “Brenda and Billy (and the Pothos Plant),” it is one of the six films, none longer than twenty minutes, which will be presented together in “Shorts #4: VICES,” this Sunday afternoon.
Yet, for all the general familiarity with its delightful stars, those unacquainted with “NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival,” which started in 2017 as a program of the now-departed New Ohio Theatre, might wonder how this can be a festival of theater and film together. The answer is simple: It isn’t.
“This Is a festival for theater people making films,” says Marc Weitz, its executive director and programmer. There is no live theater in it.
The festival showcases (as its website puts it) “work from independent theatre artists defying labels and branching out into film, TV, and digital media” – this year, six full-length features, and 28 short films divvied up into four programs.
So, for example, Ryan Spahn, an actor with a long list of Off-Broadway credits (“Gloria,” “Daniel’s Husband,” etc.) is the writer, director and co-star of “The Other John,” a short film divided into four screens to present a sexual encounter; this is not just an artful presentation; it figures in the clever twist of a plot. “The Other John” is one of the eight films in the series “Shorts 1: Drawn Together, Torn Apart,” presented Friday (tonight) at 6 p.m.
But how then to explain the inclusion of a six-minute film “I Am What You Imagine” full of poetic imagery (part of Shorts #2: Reflections, Saturday at noon) which is written and directed by Matthew Modine?Modine is a long-time movie star, having performed in more than one hundred films (Birdy, Full Metal Jacket, Oppenheimer.) Well, he did act on Broadway once (The Miracle Worker, 2010.) Does this make him a theater person?
No matter. The back-and-forth flow between stage and screen has been vigorous for more than a century especially in the last couple of decades, although the interest for festival participants seems primarily in one direction: There will be a panel discussion on Saturday by three literary agents on “the benefits and challenges of transitioning their theater clients to film and tv.”
Still, several shows do reflect the sometimes porous connection. “Wake,” one of the six full-length features, is a film that documents a theater company at work on a play on grief — which is aiming for an Off-Broadway production next year. There is even a musical, “Unlucky in Love,” which traces several years in the relationship between Lisa and Wendy, who start to date after Wendy recognizes Lisa in a grocery store after Lisa appeared on a dating show. The whole film, just five and a half minutes long, has a libretto, with a theatrical arc. (It, like the Modine film, is in “Shorts # 2 Reflections”)
The remaining feature films this weekend:
The Karamazovs tonight at 8
Nice People Saturday at 8
Wake Sunday at noon
The Martin Decker Show, Sunday at 4
