Bicoastal Film Festival Juggernaut, Dances With Films NYC 2024, Rolls Out Lineup

Posted by Larry Gleeson

Story by John Wildman

Dances With Films just rolled out an ambitious film lineup for the 3rd New York City edition of the bicoastal film festival juggernaut. December 5-8 will be packed with an incredible number of feature-length narratives, documentaries, pilots, and shorts making their world, North American, and US premieres as DWF showcases those new works as part of the only indie film-focused film festival with a foothold in both Los Angeles and The Big Apple. Evan Oppenheimer’s Peas and Carrots is set to make its world premiere on Opening Night, and Christina Elioupolos’ Here’s Yianni! is the Closing Night selection.

Among DWF NYC’s lineup of 141 films, including 22 narrative and midnight features, 9 documentary features, 18 television and streaming pilots, and 92 short films (76 combined narrative and midnight, with 16 documentaries). More than half of those films will be making their world, North American or US premieres during the four-day film event with all of the screenings taking place at Regal Union Square (850 Broadway).

In addition to Oppenheimer’s Peas and Carrots, additional feature length films making their world premieres are Liam Le Guillou’s A Cursed Man, Victoria Kupchinetsky’s Calico Rebellion, Jason Mendoza’s Good Friday, Bari King’s Itch!, Mikaela Shwer’s The Kids Are Not Alright, Dom Cutrupi’s Lola Dust, William Tyler Wiseman’s Moonwater, Paul Bickel’s One Happy Place, Jarrett Jung’s Sergeant Pickle Breath And The Rooftop Warriors, and Kristen Hansen’s Sonny Boy. Andrew Bell’s Bleeding, and Howard Goldberg’s Double Exposure will make their North American Premieres, and Nicola Rose’s Magnetosphere will make its US Premiere at DWF NYC.

DWF is also noted as being one of the current wave of film festivals embracing, promoting and platforming pilots with TV and streaming ambitions. And plenty of those will be making their debuts as well, including Sergio Camacho’s United Crafts Of America, Victoria Myers’ A Legend Is Hatched: I Become Famous… In My Own Mind, Lucy Hirschfeld’s Dropped, Christine Lakin’s The Fun In Funny, Christopher Gerson and Julie Kramer’s Gasbag, Dan Jones’ Hive, Olivia Lambert’s Like Comment Subscribe, Serena Schuler’s Makeshift Society, Karl Janisse’s Passage, Ana Breton’s Rat Czar, and Ruthie Marantz’s Raging Doll. 

While the LA version of the film festival has been around for close to three decades, it seemingly has only recently started to get acceptance as one of L.A.s and now NYC’s top fests debuting new work and putting great emphasis on putting new filmmakers at the front of the line (so to speak) ahead of films already slated to be on Amazon, Netflix, Apple +, or some other network service. And it has managed to do that while filling its theaters and maybe having the most active theater lobbies in between screenings on record.
Showcasing brand new work by filmmakers on both coasts, most of which have yet to be seen or picked up for distribution has become a hallmark for Dances With Films’ Founders and Directors Leslee Scallon and Michael Trent.

From the press release announcing the DWF NYC lineup, Scallon and Trent said, “We take the responsibility of discovering these films and filmmakers thus providing an opportunity for them to get distribution and representation furthering their careers. Just as New York City’s energy and excitement has been a driving force for us, we embrace the absolute joy of seeing so much great work on the big screen for the very first time and helping our ever-growing family of filmmakers take their next steps toward realizing their dreams under the spotlight of this great city. We hope the audiences feel it the same way we do.”

Thursday, December 5 will feature the World Premiere Opening Night presentation of DWF alumni Evan Oppenheimer’s Peas and Carrots. Oppenheimer’s film The Auteur Theory screened at DWF in 1999 with an early appearance by Natasha Lyonne. Peas and Carrots follows a teenage girl in New York who is the child of a couple that were one-hit wonders in the 90s. She also travels in a bizarre alternate reality, where everybody only says three words: “Peas and Carrots”. Naturally, her family forms a new band and start rocking out together. The film stars Kirrilee Berger, Jordan Bridges, and Amy Carlson, and the local NYC-based production also includes the involvement of numerous legendary New York musicians. Members of the Ramones, Sonic Youth, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Guster all contributed to this movie, both with new music in the score and (in some cases) with appearances on screen.

Closing Night on Sunday, December 8, will feature Christina Eliapolous’ Here’s Yianni!. The whimsical and heartwarming comedy drama stars Joe Cortese, as the title character, and Julia Ormond as a longtime couple who run a beachside family diner. Yianni develops dementia and slips into a parallel realm, believing he is the host of a late-night talk show with the diner’s staff and customers as guest stars. Meanwhile, his wife tries to hide his illness from their coworkers and best friends (Kevin Pollak and Rosanna Arquette). When a woman and her seven-year-old son move in across the street, Yianni becomes convinced that the young boy is the son they lost 30 years ago and after he escapes home and runs into the boy, Yianni must find a moment of clarity so he can navigate them both back to the diner and their worried families. The film also stars Eric Roberts and Sofia Vassileva.

Additional narrative feature films making their world premieres are Jason Mendoza’s drama Good Friday, about poor street kids who find themselves himself at odds with loan sharks and the neighborhood’s street tyrant, after a botched house robbery. Dom Cutrupi’s Lola Dust focuses on an aspiring actress who finds herself the subject of a deep fake campaign featuring her image and thrusting her unwillingly into a threatening world hidden in plain sight. William Tyler Wiseman’s Moonwater follows the efforts of a man, battling his own alcoholism while trying to revive his late father’s old, dilapidated moonshine still deep in the woods for one final batch. The Midnight category is led by the world premiere of Bari King’s survival tale Itch! in which a horrific outbreak transforms its victims into self-destructive shells. A widower grappling with grief, takes refuge in a seemingly safe department store with his estranged young daughter, Olivia. However, their sanctuary quickly becomes a nightmarish trap, as the infection quickly closes in on them.

Making its North American premiere is Howard Goldberg’s Double Exposure. The film features the dramatic collision of the past and present, as a man, in a life and death struggle with himself, combats his guilt over what happened to his first love in a #MeToo tragedy. DWF alumni (Goodbye, Petrushka 2022) Nicola Rose returns with her second feature Magnetosphere, which will be making its US premiere. At the center of the film is a 13-year-old girl with a rare ability to see sound and hear color. Her attempts to keep it a secret are shaken up when her dad mounts a ramshackle theatre production which introduces her to a host of influential new people.

Documentaries making their world premieres at DWF NYC are Liam Le Guillou’s A Cursed Man in which the filmmaker’s exploration of the world of witchcraft and the occult, leads him to have a curse placed on him forcing him to question the nature of reality and belief. Victoria Kupchinetsky’s Calico Rebellion looks at a family of farmers in the Catskill Mountains whose ancestors staged the Anti-Rent War 200 years ago, changing the cause of American history, and paving way to the anti-slavery movement and to Abraham Lincoln’s new political party. Mikaela Shwer’s The Kids Are Not Alright looks at the abuse suffered at the hands of the Troubled Teen Industry, an unregulated network of for-profit institutions claiming to fix wayward teenagers.

The television, web series pilots, and episodics also have a healthy number of world premieres. Those include Victoria Myers’ A Legend Is Hatched: I Become Famous… In My Own Mind about an   unflappable gal-about-town and her madcap quest to get her own television show. Lucy Hirschfeld’s Dropped follows a struggling actor who gets dropped by his agent in the middle of teaching a master class to a group of children at his old Catholic Middle School. Christine Lakin’s The Fun In Funny focuses on a stand-up comedian inspired to take the mic one more time due to an unlikely friendship with a young girl. Christopher Gerson and Julie Kramer are the directors of Gasbag, a coming-of-age comedy series about a lovable recently-out overtalker discovering what (and who) he really wants… thanks to a new shakeup at work and his unexpected candidacy as President of his Condo association. Dan Jones’ Hive finds five strangers discovering they’re trapped inside a tacky, low-budget sitcom and watched by an unseen audience ever hungry for entertainment. Sabina Olivia Lambert’s Like Comment Subscribe features two BFFs and top influencers in Toronto faced with the challenge of helping a vegan leather bag company recover from a trans-exclusionary scandal.

Additional pilots making their world premieres are Serena Schuler’s comedy series pilot Makeshift Society which is a female take on the tech industry via a young woman’s effort to build her own start up after being fired by her tech bro boss. Set in 1914, Karl Janisse’s Passage focuses on a ship’s stowaway who becomes entangled in a 100,000-year-old secret fueled by a mysterious entity infecting the minds of the ship’s crew. Ruthie Marantz’s Raging Doll is centered on a delusional millennial from The Bronx planning to get in the ring with a junior boxing champion. Ana Breton’s comedy Rat Czar follows New York’s newly appointed director of rodent mitigation and her staff as they attempt to win an unwinnable war against both the Mayor of New York and the city’s growing rat population. Sergio Camacho’s United Crafts Of America debut episode also features New York City, but in a much more pleasurable angle as it provides an intimate look into America’s most vibrant craft beer cities, uncovering the country’s most innovative breweries and the passionate people behind them.

Dances With Films NYC will also feature the world premieres of several short films. Narrative shorts debuting include Dustin Cook’s Artificial, Jack Campbell’s Baby, Jesse Cowell’s B!Tch I’m Early (B.I.E.), Fraser Clubb’s Blue Plaque, Tommy Heffernan’s Body Buddies, Timur Guseynov’s Brooklyn, Sara Newton’s Bullet Proof, Paula Blanco Pérez’s Canchas, Daniel Casey’s Charon, Dylan Levine’s The Clock Painter, Will Crouse’s The Coder, Grant Raun’s Composure, Misha Gankin’s Dead Pet Shark, Daniel Rocha’s El Secreto, Megan Robinson’s Have We Met?, Taylor Anthony Miller’s It’s Not You… It’s The Aliens!, Elizabeth Katz’s Role Play, Emily Coutts’ Rosebud, Juan Zuloaga Eslait’s Salve, Anima, Sofia Lane’s Sid The Kid, Andrew Lucido’s Sky, Hunter Woelfle’s Sweet & Crunchy, Emma Elizabeth Steiger’s  

Wait To Tell Mother, Shawn Dempewolff’s We Good?, and Nate Hapke’s Why Are You Like This?.

Other notable narrative shorts are Felipe Vargas’ Hive, which stars Xochitl Gomez (Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Dancing with the Stars) as a teenager forced to confront an insidious entity hidden among a group of children including a girl she’s babysitting, and Mitch Yapko’s Watching Walter, which stars Stephen Tobolowsky portraying Holocaust survivor-turned watchmaker Wladyslaw “Walter” Wojnas.

Documentary shorts making their world premieres include Aisha X. Elliott, Cheryl Wilkins, Kathy Boudin, and Jake Ratner’s Degrees Of Freedom, Simantini Chakraborty, and Godfrey Reggio’s The Original Badass, and Justin Wheelon’s Tides Of Change. Midnight shorts making their big debut on the New York “stage” include Luke Paron’s Arachnid, Alan Arias’ Walter, and Vinnie Hogan’s Werewolf Scouts.      

For more information about the Dances With Films NYC film lineup, events, passes, and tickets, go to: https://danceswithfilms.com/.

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