Stories of cultural identity, a subcultural legend, meaningful and surprising connection with others, and personal sacrifice comprise the eight short films in the Nitehawk Shorts Festival MATINEE TWO program.

Q&A WITH FILMMAKERS
PROGRAM

CUBA SCALDS HIS HAND
ABBY SUN & DANIEL GARBER / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY / 4 MIN / NEW YORK PREMIERE
Behind the scenes of the annual high school rodeo championship, Naudy Exposito, a.k.a. “Cuba,” feeds the bucking horses and bulls. When an accident befalls him, he does what cowboys do best: work through the pain.

NO FORKS IN THE ROAD
JESSICA LE / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / 9 MIN / NEW YORK PREMIERE
At a rest stop, May’s newly-found friendship with a stranger leaves her at a crossroads with her cultural identity.

MAMI
ALESSANDRA LACORAZZA / U.S.A. / 2018 / DRAMA / ENGLISH & SPANISH WITH SUBTITLES / 11 MIN / BROOKLYN PREMIERE
An overburdened daughter decides to abandon her obligations, sealing her depressed mother’s fate.

A YEAR
JISUN JAMIE KIM / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / NEPALI WITH SUBTITLES / 14 MIN
A Himalayan village woman yearns to provide a better life for her young daughters. But the only possible option she sees is surrogacy – a choice that will explode her domestic tranquility and become a searing dilemma.

THE MAGNITUDINOUS ILLUMINOUS
MAYA TIPPETT & RACHEL MILLS / U.S.A. / 2018 / DOCUMENTARY / 12 MIN
In between pouring shots at the bowling alley where he works, 66-year-old Pete Napolitano has been developing metaphysical theories. Pull up a stool to Pete’s “Table of Honor” and soak in his elucidations on how to live a creative life.

JAZZ IN WAKANDA
DJAKA SOUARE / U.S.A. / 2018 / DRAMA / 10 MIN
An otherwise uneventful day for Julie takes a more serious turn when her daughter, Jazz, starts to ask profound questions about slavery, and what she’s learned at school.

BLACKOUT
SOFIA BONAMI / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / 13 MIN / WORLD PREMIERE
A power outage in a prison classroom temporarily suspends the teacher and inmates in a reality with no barriers.

SPARE PARTS
EMILY KAPLAN / U.S.A. / 2018 / WESTERN, DRAMA / 18 MIN / NEW YORK PREMIERE
A small time hustler spots a vulnerable woman in a truck-stop town on the edge of nowhere. What seems like an easy hit becomes more complicated when unexpected tenderness develops.

The Nitehawk Shorts Festival MATINEE ONE program presents eight short films that explore sincere and insincere quests for intimacy, the attraction of nostalgia, and a very personal look at our immigration climate.

Q&A WITH FILMMAKERS

PROGRAM

I KNOW YOU SO WELL
JUSTICE NNANNA / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY / 7 1/2 MIN / WORLD PREMIERE
An intimate portrayal of the people who guide us into and out of this world featuring eleven strangers working as caregivers across the spectrum of healthcare who created a Sound & Movement Choir.

MARISOL
ZOE SALICRUP JUNCO / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / ENGLISH & SPANISH WITH SUBTITLES / 15 MIN
When a young mother takes a risk to provide for her daughter, a stranger turns her transgression into a nightmare.

WESTFALIA
HALEY FINNEGAN / U.S.A. / 2018 / COMEDY / 16 MIN
Two Instagrammers must fight to post daily after their close competitors’ following doubles overnight.

MERRYMAN
ZEKE SPECTOR & GABE HARDEN / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY / 10 MIN
For Ron Merriman, Christmas is not just a time of year, it’s a state of mind. This short explores the passion of the man behind the “Torrington Christmas House.”

WHITE ROCK SKATE
MARY DAUTERMAN / U.S.A. / 2018 / COMEDY / 8 MIN / NEW YORK PREMIERE
A delusional woman desperately clings to an abandoned skating rink and her memories of it.

THIS TIME AWAY
MAGALI BARBE / U.K. / 2019 / SCIENCE-FICTION / 14 MIN
Nigel is an elderly man living as a recluse, haunted by his past and memory of the family he once had… until an unexpected visitor arrives and disrupts his lonely routine.

FRIENDS LIKE THAT
FRANCESCA DE FUSCO / U.S.A. / 2019 / COMEDY / 8 MIN
After getting dumped, Maia seeks solace by crashing with her best ex Alex.

SOMETHING LIKE LONELINESS
SETH EPSTEIN & BEN EPSTEIN / U.S.A. / 2019 / MAGICAL REALISM / 13 MIN
Upstairs-downstairs neighbors barter sounds captured in food storage containers. With the sounds come fragments of past relationships and the hopes and disappointments that remain.

Starring: Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Nick Kroll, Bette Midler

Get ready to snap your fingers! The first family of Halloween, the Addams Family, is back on the big screen in the first animated comedy about the kookiest family on the block. Funny, outlandish, and completely iconic, the Addams Family redefines what it means to be a good neighbor.

Starring: Carter Wong, Chia Ling, Lung Chun Erh

Judy Lee is out to avenge the massacre of her family by the Emperor’s men and is assisted by another young woman. The two women wuxia heroines battle an assortment of villains, including wizards who have kung fu gorillas, as they infiltrate the evil Emperor’s court.

Starring: Jason Trost, Danny Trejo, Richard Speight, Derek Mears, Jessica Pimentel, Tyler Mane, Bill Moseley, Caroline Williams, Sean Whalen

This film contains a sequence of flashing lights which might affect customers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.

For nearly four decades, Slayer’s onslaught has proven them to be the supreme thrash-metal band on the planet, the band that other heavy acts are measured against and aspire to. With their place in music history secure, Slayer – Tom Araya, Kerry King, Gary Holt and Paul Bostaph – in conjunction with Trafalgar Releasing, Nuclear Blast Records and Prime Zero Productions, will unleash the Slaytanic offensive on the big screen when Slayer: The Repentless Killogy debuts in movie theatres around the world on November 6, 2019.

Uncompromising and unmissable, this one-night-only event will feature the short film paired with Slayer’s entire performance filmed at its August 5, 2017 concert at the Los Angeles Forum as well as a cinema-exclusive welcome from the band captured from the South American leg of their Final World Tour.

After the movie, join your fellow metalheads in the upstairs bar for more headbanging happiness: Music Video Time Machine presents BIGFOURTHRASHTV! Throw some horns for on-screen projections of music videos by The Big Four: Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer.

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Julie Hagerty

Marriage Story is Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Noah Baumbach’s incisive and compassionate portrait of a marriage breaking up and a family staying together.

Starring: Masataka Kubota, Nao Omori, Shota Sometani, Sakurako Konishi

The film is the prolific auteur Takashi Miike at his most fun and anarchic. A noir-tinged yakuza film blending genres in the story of a young boxer and a call girl who fall passionately in love while getting innocently caught up in a drug-smuggling scheme over the course of one night in Tokyo.

We close the 2019 Nitehawk Shorts Festival with eight short films that present stories on the intimacy of the nail salon, absurdist, dark comedies, and powerful coming-of-age stories about friendship.

Q&A WITH FILMMAKERS

PROGRAM

THE NEIGHBORS’ WINDOW
MARSHALL CURRY / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / 20 MIN
A mother of young children who’s grown frustrated with her daily routine and husband has her life shaken up when two free-spirited twenty-somethings move in across the street and she discovers that she can see into their apartment.

SEE YOU NEXT TIME
CRYSTAL KAYIZA / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY / ENGLISH & MANDARIN WITH SUBTITLES / 6 MIN
See You Next Time reaches across the nail salon table to capture the intimate moments shared between a Chinese nail artist and her Black client.

PRINCESS RITA
BLAIR WATERS / U.S.A. / 2019 / DARK COMEDY / 10 MIN / NEW YORK PREMIERE
A lonely insurance adjuster becomes consumed by his desire to meet his internet girlfriend, who claims to be a princess from a faraway country.

LAYING OUT
JOANNA ARROW / U.S.A. / 2019 / COMEDY, FANTASY, DRAMA / 5 MIN
An absurd comedy about a woman who examines her relationship with a man she has just started seeing in depth, and begins to explore her own misogyny, fantasies about having a penis and hatred for traditional gender roles.

THE DISHWASHER
NICK HARTANTO & SAM RODEN / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA, COMEDY / ENGLISH & SPANISH WITH SUBTITLES / 13 MIN
A chef at a fine dining restaurant in New York City asks a Mexican dishwasher to find good tortillas.

ADA
ELEANORE PIENTA / U.S.A. / 2018 / SILENT COMEDY / 16MM TO DIGITAL / 11 MIN
Ada is an unlikeable competitive walker who makes a dress out of toilet paper and has an unfortunate run-in with a hose.

NIGHT SWIM
VICTORIA RIVERA / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / 12 MIN
Three teenage girls break into a shut down pool. When uninvited guests show up, their friendship is tested and one of them is left behind.

SKIP DAY
IVETE LUCAS & PATRICK BRESNAN / U.S.A. / 2018 / DOCUMENTARY / 17 MIN
Intimate glimpses of one very special day in the lives of high-school seniors from an industrial corner of the Florida Everglades: prom’s over, the future is uncertain, and the irresistible pull of the beach makes the long-time friends drive 60 miles to chill, pose and revel in the waves.

The eight shorts in the NSF19 OPENING NITE program feature documentaries on New York communities, Brooklyn drag queens, and a firefighter’s love of cinema along with narrative stories about immigration, coming of age, sex, and self-pleasure.

Q&A WITH FILMMAKERS
PROGRAM

SYMPHONY
JAI MOSELEY / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY / 4 MIN
A kaleidoscopic film of unencumbered moments between people and places, centered in feelings, memory, and experiences that are intrinsic to us all. Filmed in Harlem, Inwood, and Washington Heights, New York.

FEATHERS
A.V. ROCKWELL / U.S.A. / 2018 / DRAMA / 20 MIN
Elizier, an emotionally-dejected new enrollee at The Edward R. Mill School for Lost Boys, must overcome memories of a tragic past and the present hazing by his peers in order to tackle larger issues dominating his young life.

A LINE BIRDS CANNOT SEE
AMY BENCH / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY, ANIMATION / 9 MIN / NEW YORK PREMIERE
Separated from her mother by smugglers, a determined 12-year-old sets out across a desert with only a plastic sack for cover, survives starvation on the streets of Ciudad Juarez, and escapes kidnappers to seek her mother and a place where they can be safe again.

NARMIN’S BIRTHDAY
JENNY GROZA & LYDIA CORNETT / U.S.A. / 2018 / DOCUMENTARY / 18 MIN
The story of Narmin, an Azerbaijani teenager living in Brooklyn, and her grandmother Ismat, as Narmin plans her 16th birthday party to be as “American” as possible–much to the dismay of Ismat.

MEMORY XPERIMENT: KATHY ACKER
AIDA RUILOVA / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / 16MM & VIDEO TO DIGITAL / 7 MIN / WORLD PREMIERE
A short film based on the literary work of author Kathy Acker. Set in the 70’s, the film is a coming of age story of a young female writer exploring her identity through sex and her writing.

HOW DOES IT START
AMBER SEALEY / U.S.A. / 2019 / DRAMA / 16 MIN
It’s 1983 and 12-year-old Rain wants sex, the only problem is she has no idea what that means. With her self-absorbed parents distracted by their recent divorce, Rain is left alone to navigate the complexities of love and adulthood, and learns to do it her own way.

THE MAKING OF PANTHERA
SAVANNAH O’LEARY & RENEE MAO / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY / 5 MIN
Weaving cinéma vérité and choreographed drama, this short documentary follows Brooklyn-based drag queen Panthera Lush and her chameleonic friends to take a closer look at the creative process behind the ever-evolving art form of drag.

ME TIME
IYABO BOYD / U.S.A. / 2019 / COMEDY / 11 MIN
After a stressful work day, DEBORAH settles in for some intimate “me time” at home until three other aspects of her psyche appear, dredge up deep-seated inhibitions, and threaten to derail her plan.

BEST PICTURE
JAY GIAMPIETRO / U.S.A. / 2019 / DOCUMENTARY / 6 1/2 MIN
Surprises are in store for a movie-obsessed firefighter who hosts an annual Academy Awards party.

Starring: Philip Brooks, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Sarah Brooks

For married man Don Koch (Philip “CM Punk” Brooks), remodeling his new home gives him the chance to start anew while trying to overcome legal troubles and fidelity struggles. Once inside the fixer-upper, Don is helpless against the house’s goo-dripping walls, sordid history and inner demons, the latter hideously exposing those of its new owner. Utilizing the expertise acquired from producing several critically acclaimed indie horror films, including Starry Eyes and We Are Still Here, Travis Stevens makes his directorial debut with a slick and wildly entertaining haunted house movie that’s truly like no other.