Ohio’s new NYC Indie Theater Film Festival (NYCITFF), now in its seventh year, has announced the in-person screening schedule for their 2023 film festival. This year’s festival will be a mix of in-person screenings and online film screenings and will present works by independent theater artists who are defying labels and branching out into Digital media and films.
NYCITFF is shown in person at the New Ohio Theater February 16-19, followed by an online presentation February 20-26. Feature films, short films, filmmaker Q&As, and episodes with industry professionals will be presented.
Six new feature films will premiere including THE GODDAMN TOONEY LUNES, LEON’S FANTASY CUT, MENDACITY, MIDDAY BLACK MIDNIGHT BLUE, A POEM AND A MISTAKE, and UNPACKING. In addition, 35 short films (two-thirds of which are directed by women and non-binary creators) will be presented across four programmes. All films will be available in person and online.
In addition to film screenings, NYCITFF will also present two interactive workshops, including one focused on virtual reality, led by improviser and XR (Extended Reality) artist Kevin Lipson. The workshop will focus on the technologies, platforms and distribution models in XR. Actress and creator Jocelyn Koretsky, along with her collaborators, will lead an interactive workshop with their company, Staging Film. The workshop explores new ways of telling theatrical stories with film, particularly in the New York avant-garde scene. The company has worked with many notables in the theater including the nominated Tony Lee Silverman and Heidi Rudewald.
All access passes are $50, which provides access to both in-person and online programming, and both in-person-only and online-only passes are $35 each. Single screening tickets $14. Workshop tickets are $20. Tickets and single tickets are now on sale at https://nycitff2023.eventive.org.
The NYCITFF is a production of The New Ohio Theatre, an award-winning nonprofit theater company in Manhattan’s West Village. All personal performances take place in New Ohio (154 Christopher Street, NY, NY 10014).
In the personal festival lineup 2023
Thursday, February 16th – Opening Night
Opening night reception at 6 pm
MIDDAY BLACK MIDNIGHT BLUE 8PM (Feature Film) – New York Premiere
Writers/Directors: Samantha Saul, Daniel Talbot
Featuring Will Bolen, Samantha Sully, Chris Stack, Merritt Weaver (Primetime Emmy Award-winning Nurse Jackie and Godless)
Isolated in an empty house on the Pacific Northwest coast, Ian is still overwhelmed with grief and shame over the loss of Liv, the woman he loved dearly, who died a few years ago. Ian’s reality becomes increasingly haunted by visions and delusions, and the only person who determines the extent of his life spiral is Liv’s surviving sister, Beth. With the memory of Liv demanding her release, and his daily existence growing darker, Ian will have to find a way to let her go, even if it kills him.
Friday, February 17th
Workshop: Infinite Space – Making Theater in Virtual Reality at 2pm
Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR) creates new opportunities for artists and creators every day. In a virtual reality project, it’s not a camera in the middle of a scene; He’s a member of the audience. Which makes Mixed Reality (XR) entertainment more like theater than a movie. In this workshop, stage maker and XR artist Kevin Lipson (KevinasaRobot) will walk you through the technologies, platforms, and distribution models in XR. They will share best practices for theater making with virtually unlimited access to potential audiences and production capabilities. After all, virtual space is like a black box theater, but without the limitations of physics.
MENDACITY AT 4PM (Feature Film)
Director: Red Farrington Author: Sarah Farrington
Featuring Kevin R Frey, Raphael Jordan, Jennifer McClinton, Laura K Nicoll, Adam Patterson
MENDACITY is a dark comic fantasy for the three months between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2021 with an adapted version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with an added element of new media and video projection.
Short Film Program: The Unconventional Tale at 6:00 pm
Short Films From music to dance to spoken word, immerse yourself in these unique films.
Art in session 6
Directors: Somi Kim, Jin Woong
Dancing after the last dance
Director/Writer: Candice Holddorf
The Girl Who Frozen – New York Premiere
Director: Joseph Gallo | Writer: Rossella Lopez
I DIGRESS: THE INTIMATE INSIGHTS OF A CHILDHOOD WEIRDO – NEW YORK PREMIER
Director: April Sweeney | Writer: Sawda Aziza Jackson
Between – US Premiere
Director/Writer: Annabella Lenzo
K2 TOG
Director: Ari Fitch | Writers: Sienna Daddario, Cooper Gordon
LIBERTY SPEAKS – World Premiere
Director: Lucia Bellini | Author: Gabriel Fox
My Body Is My Temple – World Premiere
Director: Elisabeth Piccoli | Writers: Julian Blackmore, Daniel F. Levine
PAPER PLAIN – New York Premiere
Directors/Writers: William Myers, Rana San
suspicious child
Director/Writer: Carey Patrick Martin
Lyon’s Fantasy Cut at 8 PM (Feature Film)
Writers/Directors: Josh Karas, Jonathan Valdi
Featuring Josh Karas, Paul Cooper, Ella Ray Beck, Jonathan Valdi
First-generation Ukrainian-American brothers George and Iggy know they are destined for great things. George is a wannabe business scion who vomits in a cell phone store. Iggy is a small-time pot dealer and aspiring rap mogul. They’re stuck together in a stuffy South Brooklyn studio apartment and are constantly at each other’s throats. They know their situation must be temporary – after all this is America. But both learn that their dreams are far from attainable and that unfulfilled dreams can make a person lose their mind.
Saturday 18 February
Short Film Program: DATING DRAMA at 12 p.m
Relationships aren’t always perfect, but they are always fun.
EXCAPE – World Premiere
Director: Molly Rose Heller | Author: Taylor Steele
Full disclosure
Director/Writer: Mia Ruvigno
Intimacy workshop
Director/Writer: Eddie Bronowski
JULES & DEE – New York Premiere
Director/Writer: Juliette Perel
Made in Heaven
Director/Writer: Yiqing Zhao
I, myself, against. I – World Premiere
Director/Writer: Uzunma Odeh
red
Director: Katya Kozyara | Writer: Phoebe Dunn
You can kiss me
Director/Writer: Jan Galenac
Painting/Workshop: Film Shooting – Tricks of the Trade, Fusion Stage and Film at 2pm
Staging Film – an experimental initiative that explores new and dynamic ways of theatrical storytelling with film – will conduct an interactive panel discussion and workshop, offering unique insight into the production of this cross-media work, particularly in New York’s avant-garde scene. For the workshop, there will be a special focus on ‘life’. Staging Film (The Bad Infinity, NYCITFF 2021) will also present screenings of some of their short films, showcasing a range of aesthetically experimental projects. The initiative has collaborated with some of the most influential theater artists of the past several decades, including Obie Award winners Caridad Svich and Mac Wellman, nominees Tony Leigh Silverman and Heidi Rodewald, and Lilly Award winner Chisa Hutchinson, among many others.
Happy hour from 4pm to 6pm
Take some time to kick back and relax between all the screenings at the 2023 NYC Indie Theater Festival Film Festival, and join the festival’s filmmakers for happy hour. Available to travelers!
Short Film Program: All Changes at 6 p.m
Nothing stays the same – and everyone is affected.
Big hub
Director/Writer: Chris Harkum
Great listener
Director: Tristan Nash | Author: Rachel Lin
METALERO – World Premiere
Director: Daniela Caggiano | Author: Carsten Otto
None of the above
Director: Ana Moyoli | Writers: Deniz Polat, Luisa Galati, Anna Moioli, Maria Luisa Müller, Georgia Valenti
This is Harriet
Director: Robin Weigert | Author: Nastaran Ahmadi
Waiting Period – New York Premiere
Director: Taylor Lee Nagle | Writers: Julia Greer, Julia Weinberg
Wendy
Director: Marine Lavelle | Writer: Matt Steiner
Women and villas
Director: Barbara Stepanski | Author: Marlowe Holden
Unwrapping at 8pm (Feature Film) – New York Premiere
Directors: Alexandra Clayton, Michel Sinnott | Writers: Alexandra Clayton, Joseph Schulert, Michel Sinnott
Featuring Dania Arancha, Sam Bianchini, Katie Braden, Alexandra Clayton, Gandhi Fernando, Jessica Rotondi, Michel Sinnott, Stephanie Ann Whitted, Natalie Mitchell
Six women, sold on the promise of radical transformation, travel to Bali into the hands of an Instagram guru and her Indonesian assistant — and are slapped with reality: The change is messy AF (!).
Sunday 19 February
Ode and Error at 12 Noon (Feature Film) – North American Premiere
Director: Tamilla Woodard | Written by: Sherry Maged
Featuring Sarah Baskin
Poem and Error follows the story of Myrrha, a graduate student in Classics, who grapples with how to deal with the 50 sexual assaults in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. when one of her teachers refers to the poem as “about love”. Myrrha becomes so distraught that she inadvertently pushes him off, and suddenly, like the characters in Metamorphoses themselves, the professor transforms into a young woman who looks exactly like Myrrha.
Short Film Program: Bonds of Friendship at 2 p.m
There are all kinds of friendships out there – watch our characters’ relationships be tested in extreme circumstances.
Andy and Calliope
Directors: Crystal Arnette, Catriona Rubenis-Stevens | Writer: Rachel Handler
bottom
Directors: James Kautz, Morgan Roedry O’Sullivan Author: James Kautz
EYEBALLS – World Premiere
Director: Robert Thaxton Stevenson | Writer: Molly Powers Gallagher
Lindsay Lindsay Lindsay
Director: Claire Mathiot | Writer: Billy McEntee
that they wanted
Director: Catriona Robbins Stevens Author: Byran Harlow
Scene Study – New York Premiere
Director/Writer: Trace Pope
Saqr Face (carcass)
Director: Bandar Al-Balawi Writer: Nelly Rafal
Two Women on a Bridge – New York Premiere
Director/Writer: Tom Bean
We (Don’t) Know How to Live – US Premiere
Director: Perry Fosse | Writers: Jane McClendon, Khadija Roberts-Abdullah, Perry Fosse, Hilary Wierachowski
The GODDAMN TOONEY LUNES at 4pm (Feature Film)
Director: Karsin Junk | Writer: Molly Bix
Featuring Breezy Diabo, Violet Falkowski, Jordyn Palmer, Bonnie Jean Tyre
A group of geeky teens in the New Hampshire woods start a punk band as a way to make sense of their high school angst, raging hormones, and brash personalities. When they accidentally attract followers of a cult and become legends of a local town, they struggle to balance their wayward personality with the looming pressures of adulthood.
Led by Co-Producers/Co-programmers Allison Morgan and Mark Weitz, the NYC Indie Theater Film Festival presents work by NYC-based independent artists and artists across the country who are defying labels and branching out into digital media and film. In our seventh year, we’re taking the festival in person and online, continuing to include independent theater artists from all over the US! We’re excited to take advantage of the broader access of the Internet to meet a new national community of fellow performing artists, and showcase new perspectives and voices from across the country. North and South. coast to coast. NYCITFF local and national.
The New Ohio Theater is a two-time OBIE Obie Award winning theater under the leadership of Robert Lyons, Artistic Director, and Jacqueline Biskop, Creative Producer. New Ohio serves New York’s most adventurous theater audience by developing and presenting bold new work from downtown’s diverse independent theater community. They believe that the best of this community, small artist-led groups and intrepid producing companies that operate without a permanent theatrical home, are actively expanding the boundaries of what theater is, how it is made, and who makes it. From their home in the historic Archives Building in the West Village, New Ohio provides a high-profile platform for theatrical endeavors that are more mature, silly, engaging, irreverent, disturbing, frivolous, sophisticated, goofy, and profound. For information visit www.newohiotheatre.org