Shorts Program 3: Signs of Life
57th New York Film Festival
September 27 - October 13, 2019
Featuring Patrick Staff’s The Prince of Homburg, Diane Nguyen’s Tyrant Star, Zachary Epcar’s Billy, and Beatrice Gibson’s Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters.
Q&As with Beatrice Gibson and Zachary Epcar on Oct. 4 (joined by Diane Severin Nguyen) & Oct. 5
The Prince of Homburg
Patrick Staff, USA/UK, 2019, 23m
North American Premiere
Patrick Staff’s vibrant, color-coded short, cleverly uses text from Heinrich von Kleist’s 19th-century play of the same name to explore themes of persecution and punishment, and to meditate upon contemporary issues of gender, queer resistance, and the carceral state.
Tyrant Star
Diane Severin Nguyen, USA/Vietnam, 2019, 16m
World Premiere
The star-crossed melancholy of two separated lovers is memorialized in a cathartic rendition of a beloved pop tune, intertwining the sensual and the toxic within an urban periphery of Vietnam. Tyrant Star is a musical tale of postwar emancipation and trauma.
Billy
Zachary Epcar, USA, 2019, 8m
U.S. Premiere
Zachary Epcar’s oblique psychodrama follows Billy and Allison through an evening of ominous disturbances. As flames dance, flashlights flicker, and domestic objects scatter in all directions, the couple’s home becomes a theater of contemporary anxiety.
Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters / Deux soeurs qui n’est sont pas soeurs
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2018, 23m
U.S. Premiere
In Beatrice Gibson’s dream-logic thriller, based on a 1929 play by Gertrude Stein, two amateur sleuths—played by filmmakers Ana Vaz and Basma Alsharif—investigate a crime that may not have happened. Pushing narrative beyond its limits to the point of abstraction, Gibson offers a bewitching reflection on identity, motherhood, and storytelling itself.
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