A new era in entertainment for Pine Plains began on Nov. 1 with Stissing Center’s inaugural Pine Plains Festival of Short Films.
From 1935 until the early 1960s, movies were shown at the building, then known as Memorial Hall. With the addition of a new projector and retractable movie screen, Executive Director Patrick Trettenero announced, the center will now have regular film programming as part of its expanding arts offerings.
The festival featured 10 short films spanning a wide range of subjects and styles, with local artists involved in every production. Two sets of films were screened, each followed by an on-stage conversation with the filmmakers.
Saturday screenings
Despite competition from Game 7 of the World Series, a full house viewed five films.
The evening opened with “Hollywood Mermaid: The Esther Williams Story,” a 20-minute work-in-progress by Brian Gersten, who said he had been “blown away” when archival footage led him to explore Williams’s life — from 1930s swimming championships to her Hollywood stardom and high-profile marriages.
Next came “Rosey’s,” a 15-minute cinema verité tribute to the Pine Plains restaurant on Church Street that closed in 2023. Directed by former employee Brit Ko, the film celebrates the joy Rosey’s brought to staff and patrons and highlights its early support of queer agriculture in the region.
“A Cow in the Sky,” by Darren Press, followed — an animated short interwoven with archival footage recounting the true story of an immigrant boy in Portland, Oregon whose father was murdered by racists in 1988. Press, who learned of the case while in law school, juxtaposed footage of the killer — a leader of the Aryan White Resistance—with the son’s pursuit of his dream to become a commercial pilot.
A filmed 2011 interview between artists John D. Greene and Alex Shundi offered a nine-minute exploration of Greene’s “instinctive creativity” as a painter and sculptor.
The session closed with “Mr. Marty Pants,” a humorous 16-minute film written and directed by Trettenero, starring Danne W. Taylor and Grace Angela Henry in a quirky tale of friendship, forgiveness — and turnips.
Sunday screenings
On Nov. 2, the festival resumed with “A Farrier…What’s That?” by Stan Hirson, whose Pine Plains Views website has long documented community life. The eight-minute, nearly wordless film shows blacksmith Hilary Cloos crafting and fitting a first set of horseshoes to a young horse owned by Hirson’s partner, Sarah Jones — a concise portrait of craftsmanship and care.
Next was “Lizzie,” a five-minute animated allegory contrasting urban and rural experience through a child and her perhaps-imaginary donkey friend. Producer Caroline Phipps said the film was meant to highlight the tension “between technological change and simplicity” for adults while remaining “a simple enjoyable cartoon for young folks.”
The program continued with “Alkali, Iowa,” a 17-minute film shot in Germantown in 1993. Its story of farm-family secrets — unearthed when a son finds an old lunchbox buried in a soybean field — was, producer Ann Ruark noted, “quite controversial in the 1990s, while queer cinema is just a piece of the mainstream today.”
“Pete’s Jeeps,” a five-minute homage by Matt Bartolomeo to his late father, Gino Peter Bartolomeo, portrayed his lifelong passion for Jeeps, including the restoration of a 1946 model seen around Pine Plains.
The festival concluded with “Our Farms, Our Farmers,” a 22-minute documentary by Murphy Birdsall and Keith Reamer. Featuring interviews with local farmers, it drew connections between Pine Plains’s agricultural past and present. The film, which premiered at Stissing Center in 2023, is available to stream on the Little Nine Partners Historical Society website.
