The MATINEE TWO program of the Nitehawk Shorts Festival features nine short films about community, race, loss, and family bonds. Fear of public urination, woman overly interested in her dog, and poet from Brownsville are amongst the documentary and narrative shorts in this matinee program that concludes the festival.

Includes Q&A with filmmakers. Join us afterwards for the official CLOSING PARTY at Nitehawk’s Lo-Res Bar where Festival winners will be announced. Featuring Jameson Irish Whiskey!

GET ACTION
ELAINE STRUTZ / USA / 2016 / NARRATIVE / 8 MINS
A woman’s attempt to cheer up her grieving friend goes wrong when she drags her out onto the unpredictable streets of Brooklyn.

IN WHITE
DANIA BDEIR / LEBANON / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 16 MINS
Her father’s funeral brings Lara back to Beirut from her modern life in NYC, forcing her to face the traditions she escaped and the untraditional fiancee she’s been hiding.

PEACE OF QUEV
OLIVIA CLEMENT / USA / 2016 / DOCUMENTARY / 10 MINS
A musical portrait of Brownsville artist Quindell Evans, whose music and poetry uplift his community and those around him.

DEAR HENRI,
MATTHEW SANDAGER / USA / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 13 MINS
Nine-year-old Henri recently lost her beloved namesake and pen pal, Grandpa Henry. She misses him deeply – but could their correspondence continue?

NIGHT
JOOSIE DUK / USA, THE NETHERLANDS / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 10 MINS
When Sue’s cousin Genelva visits from abroad, she hopes a night out with her friends will connect two different parts of her life.

SUNDOGS
ELIZABETH CHATELAIN / USA / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 16 MINS
A single mother and her 4-year-old daughter struggle to survive a homeless night in the oilfields of North Dakota.

RODNEY
DORON MAX HAGAY / USA / 2016 / NARRATIVE / 9 MINS
Old friends Mandy and Lisa reunite for a fun weekend, but Lisa’s strange behavior leads Mandy to suspect that something might be wrong with her.

SHY GUYS
FREDRIC LEHNE / USA / 2016 / NARRATIVE / 8 MINS
Strangers confront and resolve one of the most insidious and perplexing scourges to ever afflict mankind – while standing at neighboring urinals.

THE BACKSEAT
JOE STANKUS & ASHLEY CONNOR / USA / 2016 / DOCUMENTARY HYBRID / 8 MINS
Familial tensions are on full display when two octogenarians are tasked with driving their adult daughter to work.  

The MATINEE ONE program of the Nitehawk Shorts Festival features nine short films that portray a sense of unity, trust, acceptance and self-discovery punctuated with some genuine humor. Fictional post-apocalypses, real life trauma, and an unwanted houseguest are part of this program featuring animated, documentary, and narrative shorts.

Q&A with filmmakers.

From fictional post-apocalypses to real life trauma, the MATINEE ONE program of the Nitehawk Shorts Festival features nine short films that portray a sense of unity, trust, acceptance and self-discovery punctuated with some genuine humor.

THE TABLES
JON BUNNING / USA / 2017 / DOCUMENTARY / 15 MINS
A look at the powerful connection between a pair of outdoor ping pong tables in the heart of New York City and the unlikely group of people they’ve brought together.

BELONG
STEPHANIE HUTIN / USA / 2017 / EXPERIMENTAL / 9 MINS
What separates feral children from humans is that they don’t “belong” to anything. Neither human nor animal.

THE GARDENER
JOEL FENDELMAN / USA / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 13 MINS
In a time when water and air is overly polluted, an elderly man discovers a way to grow vegetables again and passes on this legacy to a neighborhood kid.

BUGGED
RORY COVEY / USA / 2016 / ANIMATION / 5 MINS
A city couple’s urban tranquility is abruptly shattered by an unwelcome insect guest.

GEMA
KENRICK PRINCE / USA / 2016 / NARRATIVE / 13 MINS
When Gema gets roped into meeting her fiancé’s parents for the first time, she grapples with wanting their approval and facing the truth he’s been keeping from them.

REBUILDING IN MINIATURE
VEENA RAO / TURKEY, USA / 2017 / DOCUMENTARY / 7 MINS
Ali Alamedy, a displaced Iraqi artist, makes incredibly detailed dioramas of places he has read about but has never been.

LEAVING CHARLIE
AMANDA BROOKE AVERY / USA / 2016 / NARRATIVE / 16 MINS
A queer sex worker navigates comical and often dark relationships with her co-workers and customers, while trying to discover her path in life and maintain her sense of self.

CLOUDY ALL DAY
DYLAN PASTURE / USA / 2016 / NARRATIVE / 9 MINS
Two struggling performers have a life changing experience after they accept help from a stranger.

GINA IS A C***T
KATIE SKELTON  / USA / 2016 / NARRATIVE / 2 MINS
Two women discuss their coworker, Gina.

The OPENING NITE screening of the Nitehawk Shorts Festival highlights diverse short films by nine independent filmmakers that address power, corruption, family, and coming of age. Sexual self-discovery, corporate capitalism, rural traditions, and the 2016 presidential election are amongst the stories you’ll find in this program of animated, documentary, and narrative shorts.

Includes Q&A with filmmakers. Join us afterwards for the official OPENING NITE PARTY at Nitehawk’s Lo-Res Bar. Featuring Jameson Irish Whiskey!

THE RABBIT HUNT
PATRICK BRESNAN / USA / 2017 / DOCUMENTARY / 12 MINS
In the Florida Everglades, rabbit hunting is considered a rite of passage for young men. This film follows a 17 year old and his family as they hunt in the fields of the largest industrial sugar farms in the US.

UNPRESIDENTED
JASON GIAMPIETRO / USA / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 15 MINS
In the early days of the Trump presidency a New Yorker attempts to justify his having won a bet on the election.

AND THE MOON STANDS STILL
YULIA RUDITSKAYA / BELARUS, GERMANY, USA / 2017 / ANIMATION / 11 MINS
A small monster notices the energies invoked by the moon and can’t get enough of the power.

CURTIS
TANNIS M. SPENCER / USA / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 9 MINS
A young man struggles to make amends with the harsh family life he left behind while also ensuring the safety of his younger brother Jordan.

ADOLESCENCIA
JOSE FERNANDO RODRIGUEZ / PUERTO RICO, USA / 2017 / DOCUMENTARY / 10 MINS
A portrait of a teenage boy in 2002 Puerto Rico who films odd and unusual movie vignettes by himself – and tries to get a girl’s attention in the process.

DAYTIME NOON
MICAH PERTA / USA / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 13 MINS
Narcolepsy, siblings, nudity, and senility combine for the best kind of road trip. Or do they?

AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS
AMANDA ZACKEM / USA / 2016 / DOCUMENTARY / 15 MINS
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author and activist Chris Hedges discusses modern day consumerism, totalitarian corporate power and living in a culture dominated by pervasive illusion.

YES, GOD, YES
KAREN MAINE / USA / 2017 / NARRATIVE / 11 MINS
Fifteen-year-old Alice has always been a good Catholic, but when an innocent AOL chat turns unexpectedly racy, she finds herself suddenly obsessed with masturbating.

The ART SEEN section of the Nitehawk Shorts Festival explores the relationship between art and film in the cinema. This program features Art21’s New York Up Close Series short documentary on artist Meriem Bennani, EXPLODED VISIONS (directed by Nesa Azimi & Adam Golfer), along with a selection of influential short films selected by Bennani.

Talk with Meriem Bennani and Art21 after the screening.

Can art be funny and serious at the same time? Using social media-inspired effects, artist Meriem Bennani subverts audience expectations of both pop culture and her own Muslim community with unexpected playfulness and pathos. “I feel like I have a hard time connecting to anything that doesn’t have humor,” says the artist, “because for me humor is like survival.”

Taking cues from digital platforms, in her multichannel video installation FLY, Bennani inserts a mischievous Rihanna-singing fly over footage of daily life in her native Morocco. Projected over sculpted surfaces that mimic the compound vision of flies themselves, the effect is startlingly disorienting in its comic mash up of specific cultural details and cartoonish digital tropes.

Often exploring the private lives of Muslim women, Bennani strategically navigates the line between championing and exploiting the women who appear in her films, many of whom are family members, like in her documentary-style project Ghariba/Stranger. “On one side, I almost feel emotionally like a monster who traps family members into this digital world. And then the other extreme is like fully loving and celebrating family,” says the artist.

Bennani’s largest project to date—a thirty-second video loop of women in festive “holiday” hijabs created for the massive outdoor oculus screen at Barclays Center in Brooklyn—is both an unabashed celebration of feminine Muslim culture and a negotiation of her own identity as a secular Moroccan in a polarized political climate. “What this political climate does is that it asks you to think about your identity constantly,” says the artist. “And I feel like my reaction to that has been to make work that itself doesn’t stick to a genre or one identity.”

New York Close Up is supported, in part, by The Lambent Foundation; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; VIA Art Fund; Lévy Gorvy; and by individual contributors.

The Eyeslicer is a mind-melting new TV show that will slice, dice, then mince your eyeballs into delicious ceviche. Join creators Dan Schoenbrun and Vanessa McDonnell for a one-night-only live event featuring a robot host, communal milk and cookies, and an episode presented in special ‘Smell-O-Vision.’

Each episode plays like a handcrafted mixtape blending boundary-pushing short form work into into a weird, wild, uninterrupted whole. From vérité documentary to amateur computer animation. Surreal horror to remix video art. Haunted high school yearbooks to Sasquatch birth rituals. Twisted bedtime stories to time traveling cats… if it sounds too crazy for the rest of the Internet, chances are you can find it on The Eyeslicer.

To celebrate the release of the ten-episode, ten-hour first season, the show’s creators are heading across the country this Fall with “The Eyeslicer Roadshow” a one-night-only live event featuring robot Q&As, communal milk and cookies, and even an episode presented in special ‘Smell-O-Vision.’ Trust us: you haven’t lived until you’ve smelled these smells.

The Eyeslicer premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It has been hailed as “one of the craziest TV shows you’ll ever see” (Indiewire) and “an insane variety show puree” (Entertainment Weekly).

The show features work by David Lowery, Amy Seimetz, the Zellner Brothers, Shaka King, Calvin Reeder, Lauren Wolkstein, Yen Tan, Harrison Atkins, Zia Anger, Frances Bodomo, Nathan Silver, Brian Lonano, Borscht, Celia Rowlson Hall, Patrick Bresnan + Ivete Lucas, Ornana, Leah Shore, Jennifer Reeder, and many, many more.

In the prehistoric world, a Cro-Magnon tribe depends on an ever-burning source of fire, which eventually extinguishes. Lacking the knowledge to start a new fire, the tribe sends three warriors (Everett McGill, Ron Perlman, Nameer El-Kadi) on a quest for more. With the tribe’s future at stake, the warriors make their way across a treacherous landscape full of hostile tribes and monstrous beasts. On their journey, they encounter Ika (Rae Dawn Chong), a woman who has the knowledge they seek.

Starring: Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Carlo De Mejo

In the first of director Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy, a clergyman suicide rips open a gateway to Hell, welcoming the unholy walking dead into our plane of existence. As the dead rise, a reporter and a psychic scramble to a spooky New England town to close the gate and save the world.

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI is a darkly comedic drama from Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh (IN BRUGES). After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, commissioning three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the town’s revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an immature mother’s boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing’s law enforcement is only exacerbated.

In Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig reveals herself to be a bold new cinematic voice with her directorial debut, excavating both the humor and pathos in the turbulent bond between a mother and her teenage daughter. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) fights against but is exactly like her wildly loving, deeply opinionated and strong-willed mom (Laurie Metcalf), a nurse working tirelessly to keep her family afloat after Lady Bird’s father (Tracy Letts) loses his job. Set in Sacramento, California in 2002, amidst a rapidly shifting American economic landscape, Lady Bird is an affecting look at the relationships that shape us, the beliefs that define us, and the unmatched beauty of a place called home.

Starring: Elizabeth Berridge, Shawn Carson, Jeanne Austin, Jack McDermott, Cooper Huckabee, Largo Woodruff, Miles Chapin

From director Tobe Hooper, The Funhouse follows a group of stoned teenagers as they wander the grounds of a traveling carnival, and who decide it would be a laugh to spend the night in “The Funhouse.” The night takes a bad turn when the group finds themselves trapped inside, locked in with the ride’s attendant, the homicidal freak Gunther.