What are we talking about when we’re talking about short films?

Nitehawk Shorts Festival’s WHY SHORTS? panel unpacks the current exciting, challenging, and poignant state of short filmmaking with Eleanor Wilson (Independent Filmmaker & Commercial Producer), Kentucker Audley (Filmmaker and Actor, runs No Budge), Mridu Chandra (Director IF/Then Short Docs, Tribeca Film Institute) and Ina Pira (Curator, Vimeo).

Moderated by Matthew Jacobs, Entertainment Reporter at HuffPo. Presented with Huffington Post Arts & Culture.

Hosted by our media sponsor, Huffington Post Arts & Culture.

Kentucker Audley is a filmmaker, actor and programmer. “One of American independent cinema’s most vital figures,” says Paste Magazine. His latest film Sylvio debuted at SXSW 2017, and he has starred in films such as Christmas, Again and Sun Don’t Shine. Also, he runs NoBudge which screens new indie short films and features.

Mridu Chandra is the Director of IF/Then- a new initiative developed by Tribeca Film Institute to stimulate the production and multi-platform distribution of short form documentary storytelling. She is a veteran producer of award-winning documentaries and independent feature films that explore topics of civil rights and peace, gender and sexuality, environmental justice, and the law. These films have premiered at Sundance and SXSW, aired on PBS and HBO, screened for members of the U.S. Congress & the United Nations, and showcased at Museums & film festivals worldwide. An alumna of the CPB/WGBH Producers Academy and the TFI’s All Access Program, credits include producing Ask the Sexpert (Hot Docs 2017), Out In The Night (LAFF/ POV) and The Canal Street Madam (SXSW), and co-producing Brother Outsider (Sundance/ POV), This Changes Everything (TIFF), A Good Job: Stories of the FDNY (HBO), and Electoral Dysfunction (WTTW / PBS). She mentors emerging and diverse filmmakers and has taught documentary research, development, and rights clearance courses at The New School, NYU’s School of Continuing Studies, and at The New York Film Academy.

Ina Pira curates Vimeo’s Staff Picks and Vimeo on Demand. Prior to this, Ina worked as a Senior Programmer for the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Montclair Film Festival, and the Sarasota Film Festival. In addition to her programming work, Ina has helped manage and select scripts for the Hamptons Screenwriters Lab and other year-round programs. Ina has served on festival juries and has spoken to numerous groups about film festivals, online programming, and digital distribution.

Eleanor Wilson is a NY based writer/director/producer from Adelaide, Australia. In addition to making films, she is a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, co-founder of the Picture Farm Film Festival, and a freelance commercial producer. She is an alumna of the Film Victoria Producer’s Attachment Program and the Spruceton Inn Artists Residency. Her next film, Save Me was written as part of the Write By The Sea residency at the Lighthouse International Film Festival. Her award winning short films have played at countless festivals throughout the world, with the latest Everything All At Once premiering on sundance.tv. Her first short film, Possum, won best short film at the inaugural Nitehawk Shorts Fest in 2013. She is currently producing a feature documentary, Exposure, with Holly Morris, director of The Babushkas Of Chernobyl. As a commercial producer, her clients include Acne, Apple, Coach, City Parks Alliance, ESPN, Fossil, Pepsi and West Elm.

The 2017 Nitehawk Shorts Festival MUSIC DRIVEN program highlights new voices in music videos and documentaries with an eye towards female talent, free expression, and the unifying nature of music. This program includes a special selection from Mass Appeal.

Includes Q&A with filmmakers.

IN UNDERTOW
JOE GARRITY / USA / 2017 / MUSIC VIDEO / 4 MINS

A NOVEL LIGHT THAT CHANGED
NED MYERBERG & TRACY SZATAN / USA / 2017 / MUSIC VIDEO / 5 MINS

ACTION BRONSON’S FAVORITE FOODS (PART ONE)
ROSS BRUNETTI / USA / 2017 / EXPERIMENTAL / 7 MINS TOTAL
Some of Action’s references to food from his verses (2010-2017 discography) in a loose alphabetical order.

HATIS NOIT
NICK HUGHES / USA / 2016 / DOCUMENTARY /  8 MINS
A short glimpse into the music of Japan’s Hatis Noit, whose experimental vocal music recollects distant memories of snowy hometown, Hokkaido.

THE AFGHAN WHIGS – ORIOLE
AMY HOOD / USA / 2017 / MUSIC VIDEO / 5 MINS

HATE BECOMES YOU, MY DARLING
SABRINA CHAP & ANNA HOVHANNESSIAN / USA / 2017 / MUSIC VIDEO / 4 MINS

ACTION BRONSON’S FAVORITE FOODS (PART TWO)

MISTER GOODNITE – ADULTERESS
HAOYAN OF AMERICA / USA / 2016 / MUSIC VIDEO / 3 MINS

THIAROYE BY THE SEA
DEVIN THOMAS / SENEGAL, USA / 2016 / DOCUMENTARY / 16 MINS
A Senegalese woman living in the sprawl of Dakar pursues a career as a rapper against all odds.

ACTION BRONSON’S FAVORITE FOODS (PART THREE)

MY BODY – MOOD
PETER JOHN KEARNEY / USA / 2017 / MUSIC VIDEO / 4 MINS

DIFF’ERENT
ANDREW LEE / USA / 2017 / MUSIC VIDEO / 4 MINS

DJ MOJO: MUSIC IS LIFE
LAWRENCE KIM / USA / 2016 / DOCUMENTARY / 5 MINS
An informal snapshot of NYC DJ and rock show promoter Mojo as he goes about his business while reminiscing about the golden age of New York along with the present and future of the city.

ACTION BRONSON’S FAVORITE FOODS (PART FOUR)

CHRYSALIS
SIGI XU / USA / 2017 / EXPERIMENTAL / 3 MINS
An experimental short film that explores dance as a metaphor for personal discovery and self-acceptance.

RHYTHM ROULETTE: WONDAGURL
HARRISON CORWIN / USA / 2016 / DOCUMENTARY / 6 MINS
One of Toronto’s up-and-coming producers, Wondagurl, participates in Mass Appeal’s “Rhythm Roulette” series.

BURN THE RIVER DOWN
SHAWN ENGLER / USA / 2017 / MUSIC VIDEO /  4 MINS

The Nitehawk Shorts Festival MIDNITE screening, co-programmed with Sam Zimmerman (Shudder) features the very best in new horror voices. Expect to be frightened with these fun and poignant horror short films that feature being trapped in a Red Lobster commercial, unforeseen consequences of a one-night stand, and a board game gone wrong.

Includes Q&A with filmmakers. Join us beforehand for the FILMMAKERS’ GATHERING mixer at Nitehawk’s Lo-Res Bar beforehand. Featuring Jameson Irish Whiskey!

GREAT CHOICE
ROBIN COMISAR / USA / 2017 / 7 MINS
A woman gets stuck in a Red Lobster commercial.

ELEGY
CJ GARDELLA / USA / 2016 / 20 MINS
A film, in the wilderness gothic tradition, set in a crumbling estate, where strange visions and paranoia afflict its occupants.

UNDRESS ME
AMELIA MOSES / CANADA / 2017 / 13 MINS
A socially awkward college freshman begins to experience a mysterious and gruesome physical deterioration after a chance encounter at a frat party.

THE MUSIC LESSON
ADAM R. BROWN & KYLE I. KELLEY / USA / 2017 / 9 MINS
Marion, a jaded music teacher must deal with an unruly student at her soul sucking job.

VORE
LAUREN ERWIN / USA / 2017 / 13 MINS
When her younger lover announces his departure, a wealthy, sexually adventurous, yet unfulfilled woman finally realizes what she needs to be satisfied.

THE CALL GIRLS
JUICE / USA / 2017 / 10 MINS
Junk, a local sanitation worker, impulsively decides to employ the services of a underground escort agency.

YOUR DATE IS HERE
TODD SPENCE & ZAK WHITE / USA / 2017 / 6 MINS
After dusting off an old Mystery Date-style board game, a mother and daughter realize the game holds more evil than amusement.

CRESWICK
NATALIE ERIKA JAMES / AUSTRALIA / 2016 / 10 MINS
While a young woman helps her father pack up his house, they are both increasingly aware of the presence that they always knew was there.

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.