Fourth Annual Sunnyside Film Festival Kicks Off Next Week

Tight Spot is a comedic short playing Saturday night.
Directed by Kevin Haefelin. (Manhattan)
4 minutes.
Shining the shoes of a walk-in customer, a shiner discovers his client’s dark secret.

June 21, 2019 By Shane O’Brien

Sunnyside’s annual film festival is returning to the neighborhood for its fourth installment next week.

The Boulevard Film Festival will run from Thursday, June 27 through to its closing party on Sunday, June 30, with almost all of its events taking place in the Thalia Spanish Theater at 41-17 Greenpoint Ave.

In total, 28 short films from five different genres will take place over the three days of screening, with Sunday set aside for the closing party.

Kicking off the festivities will be a series of dramatic shorts at Thalia on Thursday at 7 p.m., followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. Similar Q&A’s will take place at the end of each evening throughout the festival.

The dramatic films range from eight minutes to 38 minutes and include the “Good Girl,” a 13-minute philosophical film about a Latina teenager who is forced to examine who she really is; “Crush,” an eight-minute short exploring society’s dependence on mobile phones; and “In the Land of Moonstones,” a story of love told through the eyes of an 11-year old girl in by far the longest film of the segment at 38 minutes.

The festival will return to Thalia on Friday at 7 p.m. for a series of documentaries. The documentary program consists of six films with an accumulated runtime of 65 minutes.

“Break the Camera,” a five-minute documentary about the relationship between a U.S. war veteran and his grandchild, opens the documentary segment and is followed by “Meridians” (nine minutes), which is described as a focus on negotiations of space and surfaces with the human body and boundaries.

Concluding the documentary program is “Assigned Sex,” a topical 30-minute documentary exploring the issues of gender and sexuality.

At 2 p.m. on Saturday, Thalia will host a series of comedic shorts with a total runtime of 42 minutes from six short comedies.

Selected movies from the comedy program are “Kangaroo,” where a man is paid $1 million to watch a film every day; the one minute long “Gossip Ghouls,” which is described as a “brutally honest breaking and entering;” and “Coffee and a Donut,” which concludes the comedy program and centers around a young immigrant to the United States without any English who orders the only thing he can mimic at a local restaurant.

Thalia will host its final program at 7 p.m. on Saturday when a series of experimental shorts is screened. Spanning between a runtime of eight and 15 minutes, the films focus on a range of issues, from two lost souls finding love in New York (Apocalypse Mambo), to the psychological encounters with the alter egos of a frustrated artist (Away From You: Integration).

The final screening event of the festival will take place at midnight at Sanger Hall on 48-20 Skillman Avenue. Appropriately, the “Midnight Reverie” program consists of a series of horror and dark comedy shorts.

Finally, on Sunday there will be a closing party at Sanger Hall beginning at 5 p.m. Guests are encouraged to RSVP if they plan on going to the event.

To see a full program or to purchase tickets, visit the Boulevard Film Festival website.