New York State International Film Festival
The Linda/ WAMC Performing Arts Studio
Albany, N.Y.
Sept. 22 – 23
The eighth annual New York State International Film Festivalc elebrated small things. With all films under 30 minutes in length — some as short as three minutes — each entry had to keep its focus tight. Entrants examined the world on a micro scale, telling brief, quirky, intimate stories.
In Onur Yagiz’s Faith the Conqueror, a Turkish nerd smokes too much weed and inadvisably pursues the woman of his dreams. Eli Shapiro’s It’s a Dog offers a farcical glimpse at a balding man’s neuroses. In Allison Plante’s Tea Time, a young woman blurts out her same-sex attraction to her soon-to-be-former roommate as she packs her things to leave the apartment for good. We get only a glimpse of our characters and their inner and outer lives; the future of their relationship is uncertain. “No kiss,” Plante said during the post-screening Q&A. “Maybe later. But not now.”
The first day of the festival was dedicated to drama and documentaries, which made up the majority of the submissions. Bradley Hawkins’s Night Voices, about a disgruntled talk radio show host who receives a life-changing phone call on the air, took home the award for Best Drama. Hawkins said that this is a more adult-oriented film than his usual family-friendly fare, and that as he has gotten older he has become bolder about expressing religious faith in his art. “Words can harm or they can heal,” he said.
Paul McGreevy’s The Croquet House took the award for Best Documentary as well as the Best Young Filmmaker’s Award, given in honor of Brendan Fahy, a young photographer who passed away in 2022. McGreevy’s film is a short, sweet, very personal story of his own family’s obsession with the game of croquet. McGreevy, currently a graduate student at Stonybrook, made the film when he was just twenty-two, and says he is “pretty alright” at croquet.
The Viewer’s Choice award for the night went to Samuel Harrison Crow’s Scrawn, a documentary about a humble beast: the New York City pigeon. Crow said he cares about the birds, but “I don’t want to. They’re ugly and they’re pests.” Of his choice of subject, he said, “I’ve got to admit there’s a little nominative determinism here.”
The second day of the festival got more eclectic, with selections for comedy, horror, music videos, and experimental films. This year saw the first Bahraini entry, Hooves, a spooky short about a boy stalked by a dangerous monster. Another highlight was Functioning Female, in which student filmmaker Devin Gallant deconstructs femininity with a series of belches. Gallant says she spent two hours in a recording booth with a bottle of Mountain Dew to create the gassy soundtrack.
Francesco Paolo Cordaro took home the Best Horror award for Awake, an alien abduction story he created for Headless Horseman Hayrides and Haunted Attractions. Cordaro said he’s been obsessed with aliens ever since he saw a UFO in 2018 in the sleepy Hudson Valley town of Rosendale.
Willie Nuttall’s DIRK, a quirky short about an unlikely friendship, won the award for Best Comedy. Nuttall, who hopes to attend film school in the future, said, “My goal is to make things that are genuinely funny and genuinely beautiful.”
Johnnie Semerad’s wordless eco-fable A Tree Once Grew Here took home an award for Best Animation as well as the Viewer’s Choice for the evening. “I’m a trophy whore,” he quipped. When asked by an audience member if he felt conflicted for using generative artificial intelligence program Midjourney to generate backgrounds for his environmentalist fairytale, Semerad said, “I feel like AI is one of those revolutions that is here.”
