Short films let HIFF focus on East End

The Hamptons International Film Festival continued its tradition of exhibiting East End filmmakers and subjects this October with “East End Shorts,” a series that has run several times since the festival’s inception in 1992. Films were screened at the United Artists movie theaters in Southampton and East Hampton on October 18 and 19.

This year’s six “East End Shorts” consisted of a mix of fiction films and documentaries on a wide range of subjects, from children interacting with corpses in “It Was a Dark and Silly Night” to manipulated motion techniques in a dreamlike setting in “The Muffin Top.”

“Out Here in the Fields: Quail Hill Farm” addresses the importance of preserving unspoiled Amagansett farms and fields, and “A Relationship in Four Days” exposes the evanescence of modern-day relationships. “Second Guessing Grandma” speaks to the struggles of a homosexual coming out in the 1980s, and “Twin Lenses” explores the careers of two prominent 20th-century female photographers, one of whom has been a Montauk resident for more than four decades.

“It’s not a program about xyz, but more about representing the spectrum of accomplishment of local filmmakers,” said Cara Cusumano, programming manager for East End Shorts.

Sag Harbor resident Gahan Wilson was featured at the festival for the second consecutive year. Mr. Wilson’s dark cartoons from “Little Lit,” the latest compilation of comic art by Neil Gaiman, came to “life” through animation in “It Was a Dark and Silly Night.”

“It’s a new adventure to see my work on film, and it’s thrilling to see this thing done so well,” Mr. Wilson said of his participation in East End Shorts.

The cartoonist described Flux Animation producer Brent Chambers of New Zealand as “very sympathetic” to his intentions and the techniques of the short story cartoon. Mr. Wilson remarked on the way in which Mr. Chambers skillfully filled in the gaps of the storyline, making the cartoon characters appear to move seamlessly.

In the Q&A after the October 18 screening of East End Shorts, Mr. Wilson said that eastern Long Island is his main source of inspiration. He especially cherishes Sag Harbor for its easygoing, laissez-faire attitude. “It’s very tolerant of all kinds of kooks,” he later said, referring to himself 
as “one of the colorful village eccentrics.”

“The Muffin Top” marks 18-year-old Southampton film student Gloria Dios’s second contribution to the Hamptons Film Festival. Her first three-minute film, “All the Live Long Day,” which examines labor inequality in the modern era, appeared in the 2007 film festival.

Ms. Dios wrote, directed and produced “The Muffin Top” as part of her senior project at the Ross School in East Hampton. The six-minute documentary uses stop-motion animation, a cinematographic technique that makes a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. Currently enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Ms. Dios will serve as director of sponsorship for the Tisch film festival in March. Her career goal is to work in film production.

“Out Here in the Fields: Quail Hill Farm” tracks the efforts of Amagansett residents to serve as stewards of their 30-acre community farm. “There was no limit in terms of subject matter,” filmmaker Alec Hirschfeld said, noting that he took “as a focal point the beauty of the East End.”

The audience was taken from the pristine fields of the East End to a romantic encounter on the streets of Paris and New York City in the half-hour film, “Relationship in Four Days,” written, directed and produced by local filmmaker Peter Glanz. Mr. Glanz carefully crafts the temporal sequence of the short-lived relationship and tries out the techniques of New Wave filmmaking of 1960s France.

In the following short, “Second Guessing Grandma,” screenwriter Eddie Sarfaty and director Bob Giraldi (also an executive board member of the film festival) travel back to 1982, when homosexuality wasn’t as accepted as it is today. This 10-minute film, set in Jersey City, thrives on slapstick humor and ends poignantly with images of love and tradition.

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nina Rosenblum, founder and president of Daedalus Productions Inc., began producing “Twin Lenses” in 2000 after twin sisters Kathryn McLaughlin Abbe and Franny McLaughlin Gill approached her with the idea of creating a film based on their life in photography. “This work set the ground rules for other films we did afterward,” Ms. Rosenblum said, explaining the non-narrated style of “Twin Lenses.”

Whereas “we take women fashion photographers for granted” nowadays, Ms. Rosenblum said, the twin sisters were quite an anomaly at the peak of their careers. “It shows you what kind of mind it takes to break through the glass brick ceiling,” the filmmaker added.

On behalf of Southampton Village Mayor Mark Epley, a proclamation was read just before the film’s premiere on Saturday, October 18, praising the McLaughlin twins for the “indelible mark that you have both made in the world, and especially in the world of photography.”