Jennifer (Laura Prepon) has a tough time turning thirty in GenArt closing-night film THE KITCHEN
School of Visual Arts Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
August 8-14, $30 (includes film screening and free drinks at after-party), seven-day pass $150
212-255-7300
festival.genart.com
The seventeenth annual GenArt Film Festival begins August 8, kicking off a week of screenings dedicated to one feature, one short, and one after-party each night. The opening-night films are Martin Snyder’s Missed Connections, a New York-set romantic comedy that won the Audience Award at this year’s Sarasota Film Festival, and Leah Shore’s animated documentary Old Man, made from actual conversations between author Marlin Marynick and Charles Manson. The festival continues with such films as Jorg Ihle’s cell-phone thriller Privacy, Nelson Cheng’s magician documentary The Magic Life, Jonah Ansell’s animated afterlife short Cadaver, with the voices of Christopher Lloyd and Kathy Bates, Jaime King’s Latch Key, in which a young teenager tries to ignore the sudden death of her mother, and Evan Abramson and Carmen Lopez’s Carbon for Water, about the search for clean water in Kenya. The closing-night selections are Ishai Setton’s The Kitchen, in which a woman’s (Laura Prepon) thirtieth birthday is not quite the celebration she imagined, and Ryan Eggold’s Literally, Right Before Aaron, about a man (Adam Rose) invited to his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. Awards will be given out for Best Feature, Best Short Film, best emerging-actor performance, and audience favorite; this year’s jury consists of Jay Duplass, Ben Lyons, Matt Singer, and David Blaustein. Each evening will begin with a cocktail reception, include a postscreening Q&A, and conclude with an after-party at the Thompson LES hotel in the East Village or another location.