Last night I attended the opening night screening and reception of the 16th Annual Stony Brook Film Festival.
Our film blogger, Joe Piccininni, was planning on joining me, but he got in a car accident on the way. Luckily, he wasn’t hurt; unluckily, it is impossible to drive to Stony Brook without a car.
I sat down in the Staller Center’s auditorium, and the guy sitting three seats to my right turned to me and introduced himself. He shook my hand and asked me if I was one of the filmmakers (apparently the filmmakers’ passes and press passes are nearly identical). I told him that I was there to cover the event for The Statesman, and asked him if he had a film in the festival.
As it turns out, Cody Blue Snider, the guy of whom I sat three seats to the left, is a 21-year-old filmmaker who, coincidentally and previously unbeknownst to me, went to my elementary school. Cody spent his early years living in a house about a block away from mine. For such a big world, it sure is small.
Anyway, Cody’s short film, “All That Remains,” will be featured in the festival on Wednesday night. The short has earned a great deal of attention because it was filmed entirely in Stony Brook. Cody graciously agreed to talk to me about his film at some point during the festival, so expect a post about that sometime next week.
The film that opened the festival is called “Sonny Boy,” and was brought to Staller from the Netherlands. The characters in the film speak Dutch and German, so the version shown featured English subtitles. The movie opens in the 1920s and explores the years prior to, during and following the Holocaust. Alan Inkles, the director of the Staller Center and founder of the Stony Brook Film Festival announced that the evening’s screening was to be the premiere of the film in the United States.
Inkles announced that the film’s director, select cast members, and a couple of others involved in the making of the film were sitting in the audience and would be answering questions at the conclusion of the showing. The guy next to me expressed in words exactly what I was thinking when we were informed of this: “This is pretty awesome; to have them in the same room as you,” he said.
It was an incredible night, and not only because of the movie. It was a night that truly mixed the Dutch and American cultures, as everyone involved with the film is visiting from Holland and will be leaving to return home on Sunday. Doranne and Pien Nods, who are the granddaughters of the man whose parents’ story is told through the film, are two of the sweetest girls I have ever met. The two are 15 and 17 — not much younger than I am. We talked about shopping (they’re staying in the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue, and this is their first trip to New York City), compared music tastes, and recommended stores and bands for each other to check out. At the conclusion of the night, I found myself sitting at a table at the after-party in the Wang Center talking with Cody, his friend Jordan Jacinto — an acting student who goes to school in L.A. — and Waldy’s granddaughters, as the five of us tried to introduce each other to the aspects of our own countries that stick out in our minds.
To find out more about the film, and to read what its director and cast members had to say to me, see my next blog post.