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The COVID-19 pandemic may have disrupted how people consume art, but this weekend the Innovation Group of CNY Arts and Light Work’s Urban Video Project are partnering to allow people to observe art together in a socially-distanced fashion.

Four short productions filmed in central New York will be shown this weekend from Thursday to Saturday from 8:30-11:30 p.m. at the Everson Museum Plaza as part of the “Horizons: New Film out of Central New York” film showcase.

The event, hosted by Light Work’s Urban Video Project, will include the four winners of the 2019 CNY Short Film Competition: “Homegoing” directed by Carlton Daniel, “I Wish” directed by Kathryn Ferentchak, “Early Bird” directed by Issack Cintrón and “Apocalypse … Now?” directed by Charles Stulck.

People attending the screenings will be directed to sit six feet apart, unless they are in a family unit, and encouraged to wear a mask the entire time they are at the screening. All four films together run for just under an hour, so there will be multiple viewing times throughout the evening. The capacity for the screenings is 50 people.

“This is going to present people with an opportunity to get out of the house, or to get out of their dorm rooms and off-campus,” said Urban Video Project program director Anneka Herre. “It’s going to be something where it’s really easy to maintain social distance.”

The Innovation Group of CNY Arts distributed $40,000 — granted by Empire State Development — to the four directors for winning the competition, said Alexander Korman, the CNY Arts film fund program officer. The funding was used to finance their short films.

As part of the competition’s rules for winning, all short films had to be filmed in the central New York region. Daniel, Class of 2016, used Syracuse’s urban environment as the setting for his film “Homegoing,” which is about a mortician’s son who must decide whether to follow his dream career or agree to work in the family business.

Woven into the story are themes of gun violence, racialized policing and structural racism, Daniel said. When writing the film, Daniel focused on showing how these themes devastate Black and other communities of color — themes he has seen throughout his entire life.

For Stulck, a 2014 graduate of SUNY Oswego, filming in central New York offered him a sense of familiarity since he grew up outside of Albany. “Apocalypse … Now?,” a dark romantic comedy, Stulck said, was filmed in Manlius to capture the small-town setting.

The movie is about a woman in her 20s who moves to a small town to sell “plan-B policies,” which Stulck further described as a plan people buy for when the world is about to end.

Stulck wishes that he had foresight of the COVID-19 pandemic so that he could have added a similar situation into the script, but he is still pleased with the way the film turned out, he said.

The “Horizons” event will kick off Urban Video Project’s exhibit

The film “Homegoing” is about a mortician’s son who must decide whether to follow his dream career or agree to work in the family business. Courtesy of Carlton Daniel

“Urban Video Project is really this kind of spectacular platform for showcasing moving image arts, right in the heart of downtown Syracuse,” Herre said.

The mission of Urban Video Project is to support younger, emerging artists and filmmakers and provide them with space for many people to view their work.

For Daniel, he appreciates the opportunity to show “Homegoing” because he is looking for financiers to help him turn his short film into a full-length feature film.

“I want (the audience) to be immersed in the story and the emotion,” Daniel said. “I want them to correlate that they’ve seen the film with, with the things that have happened in Syracuse.”

Published on August 31, 2020 at 11:59 pm

Contact Louis: louis@dailyorange.com | @JBL__98