NVV 2023 Filmmakers A - K

B

Ryan Barnett is a writer/director from San Francisco, currently a senior in UGFTV. He has a deep love for films without plots, and a crippling inability to write a director biography.

In the Siren's Light
A man receives a box of tapes he filmed with his ex-girlfriend following their breakup. 

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Ilina Bhatia is a filmmaker and fine artist based in New York City. She is a senior at NYU Tisch studying Film and TV Production, with an interest in writing/directing, production design, and editing. She currently works for Universal Music Group as an °1824 Content Creator. She’s heavily influenced by absurdism, surrealism, and her South Asian culture. Her work has been exhibited at Dock of the Bay Music Documentary Film Festival, Houston Asian American Pacific Islander Film Festival, Film Diary NYC, Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival, Sonder Exhibition, and Leslie-Lohman Museum.

ELSEWHERE is a branded-content documentary highlighting the Brooklyn live-music venue and nightclub, Elsewhere. Following four artists––including Mura Masa––of different genres, along with their fans and Elsewhere regulars, the documentary gives viewers a taste of the unique venue’s spirit, the metaphysical feeling of the space, and their mission to contribute to an uplifting dace music scene by fostering an inclusive community space.  

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Grace Bragdon is a writer, comic, director, and actress based in New York City. She will graduate from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in spring of 2024 and hopes to pursue a career in screenwriting and comedy, alongside her activism for animal rescue, LGBTQ+ issues, and OCD awareness. 

Cutouts
This is a music video about the love life of an angsty teenager who has lost love.

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Ama Buzo is an Albanian filmmaker with expertise on directing, editing & cinematography.

Her directing work gravitates towards dark fantasy and striking visuals that create escape worlds through the lens of female gaze. With experience in art and architecture, she has a strong eye for production design and insane mood boards.

Treasure Hunt
In a whimsical realm born from his imagination, a grieving young boy undertakes a spellbinding treasure hunt, encountering an enigmatic old man, a mystical fortune teller, and a blind artist, all while grappling with the profound notions of "death" and "loss."

C

Chayne Cooper is a tri-state native and NYU 2023 graduate from Piscatway, New Jersey. Their style of storytelling often leans towards a more surreal and goofy expression of inner conflicts. Seeking to tell absurd stories with grounded characters.

Wetfood
Jon Arbuckle has been struggling with comic creation and dating for a while now. His only creative saving grace has been the assistance of his muse, Garfield. However, in order to really land the right punchline, Jon has to feed Garfield. There’s just one small problem — Garfield has developed quite the appetite for human flesh. That's all well and good until Jon finally lands a date with Liz Wilson, who happens to be coming over tonight.

D

Liv D'Arche has been making short films since she was a sophomore in high school. She has always been drawn to commercials and highly macro shots that showcase details in commercials. In her freelance work, she mainly focuses on sound engineering and directing commercials for local businesses. In her free time she loves to rock climb and explore the city with friends. 

Jack Daniel's Spot
Table top focusing on the details of Jack Daniel's and the possibilities of creation using this product. 

F

Nadia Fortini is an award-winning director and writer working in New York City, Los Angeles and Warsaw. 

She was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, but moved to New York after receiving a scholarship at the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she earned her BFA graduating with honors. 

We Carry It Around
Upon receiving a vintage camera with undeveloped film inside, a young girl is forced to deal with the trauma of her sexual assault.

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Peyton Freeney is a Filmmaker Born and Raised in Eastern Iowa. As a writer, director, and animator based in New York City, Peyton has always been a fan of fantastical and fictional storytelling. He’s passionate about telling stories that explore and expand the black imagination. 

Cain't Use My Phone
Afro futurism and Afro surrealism collide to create this experimental interpretation of Erykah Badu's song Cain't Use My Phone.

Pool of Memories
A couple goes to a magical lake determined to escape the mistakes of their past but only one stays.

G

Adriana Guevara is a Peruvian, third-year undergraduate student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her time at NYU has been dedicated to the post-production process, where she hopes to make a career out of editing feature films. Outside of the editor’s chair, she also enjoys directing magical-realism. She is originally from Houston, Texas.

GUM GARDEN
A dentist who has dedicated his career to researching oddities in his profession, stumbles upon a peculiar case. 

H

Alexandria Hellman is an African American and Jewish writer/producer/director with a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts BFA in Film & TV, and a double minor in Astrophysics and BEMT (Business, Entertainment, Media & Technology). She created her first feature film at sixteen that screened at NBC Universal, and has since then produced several short and feature length films across the country. She has self-produced numerous of her own projects, the most recent being a half hour drama series that garnered interest from Apple TV and CK Talent in 2021. During her 2022 gap year, she discovered a love for post-production sound and is now a certified audio engineer. Post graduate, Alexandria returns to writing/directing, now with years of experience in development and pre-production as a producer, and the knowledge of post-production through sound design, that adds to her abilities as a director. 

will you be my father?
A young girl without a dad seeks a father figure; shot on 16mm. 

J

Mia Renee Jones is a multi-disciplinary artist from Ashburn, Virginia. She is a filmmaker, animator, writer, and visual artist and utilizes both physical and digital mediums in her work. Thematically she is guided by her connection to the spiritual world, often choosing to draw from dreams and childhood experiences. She is also inspired by the supernatural and drawn to storytelling about aliens, angels, cryptids, ghosts, demons, and astral projection.

Hark! I Hear the Angel's Flute investigates human ideas of extraterrestrials, the supernatural, and divine intervention and what they reveal about human nature by telling a fragment of a story inspired by the true events of a mass UFO sighting by school children in 1994 at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe. 

K

Mia Karle is a writer and editor based in LA. Originally from Birmingham, AL, she grew up watching cult classics, rom-coms, and really any film that would never make it into the Criterion Collection. Whether in a script or in the editing room, Mia aims to find comedy and connection in small moments to amplify significant societal themes.

A Match Made On Eleven
When a 1930s matchmaking elevator operator fails to find the perfect couple, he desperately tries one last time to match an unusual pair that will go down infamously in history.

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Eunice Kim is a writer and filmmaker whose works are quiet experiments into which her loud consciousness can pour.

Every Page Creases
A meditation on the losses, ailments, and pasts that define us; on pages which crease and memories which crumple.

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Joshua Sunho Kim is a filmmaker who's heavily interested in blurring the lines between fiction and reality. He strives to find new and experimental ways to tell stories. He primarily focuses on documentary work and has a passion in editing. 

I Am A Deck of Cards
Nelson Dominguez comes from a long lineage of former Nelsons. He has inherited his family's magical deck of cards, but tries to use them to live a very normal life. In his path of living out his day, he meets Tobi. Both individuals are quite ordinary, but only meet because of the extraordinary deck of cards. 

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Dean Kobs is a senior at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts studying animation in the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. He enjoys all forms of sequential image storytelling, with a special fondness for storyboarding.

FLYBOY
Walking on the side of a barren desert road, Flyboy is holding his guitar bindle with one hand, his cocoon friend Siid with another, and is sticking two others out into the street in hopes of hitchhiking a ride to anywhere that will serve him a hot meal and an iced water. Vehicles ignore him until finally one stops—a kind weevil named Kärsa in a beetle-horned convertible beetle car. Kӓrsa agrees to take Flyboy and Siid along with him, but soon a Cactus Wren picks up their scent. Running out of ideas to stop the swooping wren, Flyboy sings a song to wake Siid up from his metamorphosing slumber. Siid wakes up, emerges from his cocoon, and scares off Cactus Wren with the intimidating eye-shapes on his new moth wings.

Glutton
How can the process and exercise of “life drawing” be transformed via timing and editing into an involved synthesis of “life animating”? Does this new, hyper-controlled process strip the life away, or add it? How does this change the relationship between the artist and his subjects?