Lucas and I are proud to be screening at the second annual Wassaic Project Summer Festival this Friday. 7:00pm in the Luther Barn Auction Ring. As in, former livestock auction ring — so real! Click HERE for details. Our block of shorts is being curated by our friend, the extremely talented Liliana Greenfield-Sanders — her films are top notch, and one of them (”Adelaide”) also screens on Friday. Don’t miss it — the trailer will make you laugh and hook you totally. The whole Wassaic festival sounds amazing — check out a recent New York Times article that gives a great overview. If you’re around upstate NY, or feel like a ride on Metro-North up from the city, I can’t imagine a nicer way to spend the weekend… great art, music and film in a swell setting.

Greetings everyone. Wanted to send out the word that “Parachute” is screening this Saturday, April 25th, in the Newport Beach Film Festival. It’s at 1:30pm in the Edwards Island 2 venue. Click HERE for all the details.

Newport Beach is an excellent festival and we’re honored to be showing our work alongside such talented filmmakers. If you’re in the Los Angeles area this weekend, come down for some sunshine — or, rather, for some air conditioning and darkened theaters. Many great shorts will be viewed and fun will be had by all.

Make sure to tell your friends and family in Orange County to come on out. Hope to see you there!

Tonight– that’s right, TONIGHT!– Parachute will be shown at Film Independent’s Cinema Lounge at 7:30pm, on the West side of Los Angeles.  Film Independent is a great organization for independent film and filmmakers (responsible for the Indie Spirit Awards and the L.A. Film Festival, among other things), and the Cinema Lounge is a really cool monthly screening series.  Here’s how it’s been described:

Film Independent’s Cinema Lounge is the coolest way to view short films and meet filmmakers. Cinema Lounge takes center stage at the hip and chic Whisky Blue Bar at the W West Los Angeles. Sip a cocktail on a comfy couch and watch an eclectic mix of fascinating foreign, inspiring documentary, brilliantly crafted animated or truly entertaining short films. Each month there are new and fresh films and filmmakers that want to share their stories with you after the screening. It is a fun, relaxed atmosphere that serves free beer and free popcorn.

The screening is free tonight, at 7:30pm:
The Whiskey Blue Bar at W Los Angeles
930 Hilgard Avenue in Westwood (map & directions)
$10 valet parking, $5 with purchase
Street parking is available.  A $7 dollar lot is on Weyburn.

The screening will begin at 7:30pm followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Here’s a complete list of the films showing tonight:

Chief : Directed and written by Brett Wagner; produced by Dana Hankins and Brett Wagner. After the tragic death of his daughter a Samoan Chief is pulled back to the life he left behind. 21 minutes

Kate Wakes: Directed and written by Jasmine Kosovic; produced by Adrienne Gruben and Nancy Leopardi. A man. A woman. A conference room. Two cell phones. Sometimes connection is just a ring tone away. 17 minutes

Parachute: Directed by Lucas Fleischer and Paul Grellong; written by Lucas Fleischer; produced by Paul Grellong and Matthew Goldberg. A precocious young boy strikes up an unlikely friendship with a checked out slacker in his thirties. 12 minutes

New Boy: Directed and written by Steph Green; produced by Tamara Anghie. Being a student is never easy: as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old African boy. 10 minutes; 52 seconds

We’re sorry for the short notice, but hope to see you tonight!

This is a very exciting week for Parachute.  We’ll be showing at the DC Shorts Film Festival.  A Film Fest Circuit favorite, it just happens to be in our nation’s capitol, home to Lucas Fleischer, and the locale where Grellong and Fleischer made their first collaborative cinematic effort.

Parachute has the distinct honor of opening the festival.  We’ll be the first film showing in the first series of films, this Thursday night!  If you’re in the DC metropolitan area please go check it out.  Click here to buy tickets.

Show times:
Thursday, September 11th at 7pm
Sunday, September 14th at 4:30pm
Wednesday, September 17th at 9:30pm

If you know anybody in that area, send em there.  It’s a great fest.  They won’t be disappointed!

We are extremely proud to announce that PARACHUTE will screen at the 1st Annual Downtown Film Festival, Los Angeles!  We’ll be showing on Sunday, August 17, at 6:30PM at the Laemmle Grande.  This hot new festival takes place at some of downtown’s most beautiful theaters.  In fact, our friend Scoot’s movie In Search Of A Midnight Kiss will kick off the festival at the Orpheum!

Tickets are available online at dffla.com.  This one’s local, Angelenos, so spread the word and check it out if you can!

Another amazing thing about the Downtown Film Festival is that our friend Scott Keiner’s movie Sizzlean is showing in it, and it also stars Brandon Ratcliff!  You can do a Brandon Ratcliff double-feature, all in the historic heart of Los Angeles, where the echoes of Vaudeville and the ghosts of the golden age of film are in the air.  We hope to see you there…

Parachute was just accepted at yet another festival!  The 1 Reel Bumbershoot Film Festival in Seattle, Washington is “one of the nation’s best attended short format festivals in the US, drawing over 20,000 filmgoers, filmmakers and industry each year.”  And Bumbershoot is the West Coast’s largest music and arts festival.  So it should be a lot of fun.  Our friends the Varava Brothers told us this was one of their favorite festivals ever attended. We are so psyched about all these opportunities to show our movie.  Everyone we’ve met so far has been fantastic.  We can’t wait!

This year at Cinegear, Parachute was named Best Independent Short!  We couldn’t be more pleased with the honor, and are extremely thankful to the fine people at Cinegear, including Kimberly Gomez and all the judges.  We’d especially like to thank all of the cast and crew members, and our friends and supporters who came to see Parachute on the Universal backlot last Thursday.  At the award ceremony Friday night, our fearless cinematographer Damian Acevedo accepted the award.  A man of few words, his speech was as follows: “Thank you.”

The prize for winning Cinegear is an extremely generous production package sponsored by Deluxe Labs, Fujifilm, Mole Richardson Co., Pro8mm, and The Camera House.  We’re looking very forward to putting it all to good use!

This was an incredible week…  Parachute was accepted into two great new fests!

The first, DC Shorts, is the premiere short film festival in the nation’s capital, Washington DC.  In fact, MovieMaker Magazine calls DC Shorts “one of the nation’s leading short film festivals.”  Lucas is from DC, so it’ll be a particular honor for him to screen there.

The second fest is the Palm Springs International Shortfest Short Film Festival & Film Market.  Shortfest is renowned worldwide for the extraordinary community of filmmakers it attracts, and for the quality and scope of its programming.

These are two phenomenal film festivals, and we’re thrilled to be invited!  If you live in or near either place, please come join us!

This Thursday, June 19th, at 12:30pm, Parachute will have its Los Angeles debut at the prestigious Film Series at Cinegear Expo!  It’ll be screening in beautiful high definition, and if you’re in the L.A. area we would love for you to come see it.  The screening will take place on the Universal Studios back lot.  There’s even a rumor floating around that Brandon Ratcliff, the delightful nine-year old star of the film, will be there!

For tickets and info, go to the Cinegear website.    We hope to see you there!

UPDATE: Apparently, if you want to attend the screening, you must also register so you can get on to the Universal lot.  Please do!  Thanks!

Oh man!  We are still reeling from an unbelievable weekend.  We met so many great people and saw such powerful, funny, and delightful films that this one will be hard to beat.  Big thanks go to Melanie Miller, Cevin Cathell, and the rest of the amazing Jackson Hole team.

And wow, what a great group of new friends we made.  We spent most of the weekend with Vineet “Vinnie D” Dewan and Rob Connolly, whose powerhouse film Clear Cut, Simple won best Student Short.  We also had a lot of fun with new friends Siobhan Mahoney and Courtney Balaker, whose film Cute Couple won the Audience Choice award, as well as Alison Heather who was representing the land down under with her film Love On Track.  And you know we always get down with Jeremy Brunjes, who we met at the Phoenix Fest.  Adding to the insanity was a surprise showing by our old friend Alex Wagner, of 19 Arnold fame, whose organization Not On Our Watch was there for the Global Insight Summit.  She’s down with B.K. Moon.  No big deal.

We saw two shorts and two features that warrant special mention, as we could not stop talking about them.  The first, Pop Foul is a jarring, powerful and personal tale of the cycle of violence in urban America.  The story is beautifully told, and extremely well acted.  And the second short, I Love Sarah Jane, was just tremendous.  A sweet tale of what it’s like to be in love, when you’re twelve years old.  Oh yeah, and it’s set in a zombie post-apocolypse.  Incredible.

The first feature that stood out for us was a gorgeous, funny, sad, romantic Romanian film from Cristian Nemescu set in a small, backwater town in Romania during NATO’s time in Kosovo, called California Dreamin’ (Endless).  The second, and arguably the most affecting thing we saw all weekend, was a documentary called Very Young Girls.  This shocking film, about teen sex exploitation in America, was a real eye-opener.  Rachel Lloyd, the founder of GEMS (Girls Educational & Mentoring Services) in New York, the main subject of the film, was there to answer questions.  This is a movie everyone in America should see.

Thanks to everybody who came to see Parachute!  The weekend was nonstop, and we had an unbelievable time.  We hope to go back there in the future… Jackson Hole Film Festival knows how to do it RIGHT.