REBIRTH.jpeg
The perpetually adolescent Murph tries to keep his brother and his brother's fiancée from seeing pictures he photoshops of her giving birth to him, while living in his brother's house.
Crew
Directed & Edited by Elias ZX
Cinematography by Eli Kravetz
Written by Alex Vrahas & Elias ZX
Produced by Chase Newman, Andrew Stern & Elias ZX
Music by Noah Horowitz, Matt Rose, Cashel O’Malley and Charlie O’Connor
Starring Anthony Oberbeck, Anya Krawcheck and Robert Lincoln
Featuring Stuart Zagnit, Tynan DeLong, Collin Burgess and Rajat Suresh
Poster by Stephanie Monohan
Awards & Screenings
Audience Award - Drunken Film Fest 2021
Honorable Mention - Geneva Downtown Film Festival 2022
Official Selection - Athens International Film and Video Festival 2022
Official Selection - Americana Film Festival 2023
Official Selection - Queens World Film Festival 2022
Official Selection - Deep Focus Film Festival 2022
Official Selection - Atlanta Underground Film Festival 2022
Official Selection - Film Maudit 2022
Official Selection - Hacker Porn Film Festival 2021
Official Selection - Sick n Wrong Film Festival 2021
Official Selection - Filmfort 2021
Available to stream on TROMA NOW
Available to rent from the FILM-MAKER’S CO-OP
Featured in the February 2022 edition of DO NOT RESEARCH
Last KNOWN INTERVIEW WITH ZACHARY WEINSTEIN (100 YEARS OLD)
The final interview with a filmmaker who had died four years prior. A ghost story about movies, about how all movies are ghost stories.
Crew
Directed by Elias ZX
Screenings
Official Selection - Athens International Film and Video Festival 2023
Official Selection - Drunken Film Festival Oakland 2023
Official Selection - Unnamed Footage Festival 2023
Featured as part of D E E P Season 3, Episode 1
Official Selection - Swedenborg Film Festival 2022
CRYING SONGS TRILOGY
When I was 4 years old I decided I Try by Macy Gray would be my “crying song.” Between April and September of 2022 I made three films based around the idea of performing a karaoke version of I Try.
The series starts as a structuralist experiment, turns into a diary film and ends, as all things do, as a narrative comedy.
The very literally titled I Try Macy Gray - I Try (Karaoke Version) uses a custom version of the track purchased on karaoke-version.com. I made some slight modifications to the instrumentals including the removal of all backup vocals. I exported the video a few times at a low quality so the text would become really crunchy and pixelated. I layered it atop 4k scans of black frames found within six hours of super 8mm footage I had recently acquired. I looked closely for light leaks or any identifiable scratches, there are over a hundred unique shots within the four minute film, but you wouldn’t know that if I didn’t tell you.
Part 1 screened as part of Millennium Film Workshop’s opening night party on June 3rd 2022. The film was featured as one of 57 works from 54 different artists, “which challenge the popular notion that the form of the music video, a form conceived at the intersection of popular music and TV consumption, is one doomed to an interstitial existence between fuller realized and more respectable cinematic and musical disciplines.” During the screening, many audience members started singing along. I filmed their performance on my waterproof Kodak while Sage Ó Tuama shot the crowd on digital video, the resulting film is our collaboration.
“I TRY” follows Tommy McNamara as Tommy McNamara, trapped in a bar bathroom on karaoke night, preparing to sing the one song he knows will make everything right. Can you guess what it is? The short was co-written and co-produced by my dear friend Michael Price, shot by the wonderful Josh Kundert-Gibbs and colored by Kody Wescott from Assembly. We shot the majority of the film in a half-day at Starr Bar and shot the VHS-credits at Millennium Film Workshop many months later, after the film was fully edited. It was a very fun film to make and I can’t wait to show it to you.
SMALL WONDER
This is the film Grandma Sally made for her family. Well, technically I made this film. Also, Grandma Sally is not my grandmother, I have actually never met her in my life, I don’t even know her last name. This film is composed using clips from a RCA Small Wonder camcorder that Sally filmed videos on between 2009 and 2010. I bought the same camcorder at a flea market in 2022 for five dollars, she never cleared the memory card.
“One of the best films of the year.” - Daniel Goldhaber (Director, How to Blow Up a Pipeline)
Crew
Edited by Elias ZX
Screenings
Official Selection - Ithaca Experimental Film Festival 2023
Official Selection - Film Diary NYC 2022
YOUR SECURITY
Your Security is a film about romance, scams and romance scams and was shot on location in Prague on 35mm film.
Hear more about the film on the NFFTY Podcast.
Crew
Directed, Written & Edited by Elias ZX
Cinematography by Cece Chan
Gaffer & Colorist Zack Chalmers
Music by Jackie Elliott
Starring Patrick Bentley, Lucia Edwards, and Jamie Marshall
Awards and Screenings
Honorable Mention, ‘Best Experimental Film’ - NFFTY 2019
Official Selection - Big Muddy Film Festival 2020
Official Selection - Queens World Film Festival 2020
Official Selection - Independent Film Night at the Newtown Theatre 2020
Official Selection - 25 Under 25 Film Fest 2020
Official Selection - NoBudge 2020
Official Selection - Interface Video Art Festival 2020
Official Selection - Syndicated Shorts 2020
you deserve the best
You Deserve The Best was filmed over the course of eight months on five different cameras, the film takes a run-and-gun shooting approach and applies it to the random, often difficult and often beautiful experience of life.
FOR THE MICE THAT DUG THROUGH THE WALLS OF OUR APARTMENT
Eleanor said she wanted me to make a movie about the pigeons, she said our cat could go viral.
John said, “No commerce, no contract, just free music from me to you.”
This is a film about a lot of things that happened but mostly October 11th through October 18th 2021.
My only request is that you watch this film on the biggest screen possible with the best sound you have access to.
Crew
Images: Elias ZX
Sounds: John Vanderslice
The Arrival of Another Train at La Ciotat Station
The Arrival of Another Train at La Ciotat Station is a tribute and reimagining of the original 1896 film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Both films were shot on location in the south of France and feature a train speeding towards the camera and by extension the viewer. Another Train adds to the original story by putting additional focus on the journey to the fateful station.
Crew
Directed by Elias ZX
Screenings
Spectacle Theater - “The Videos Are Coming From Inside the House” 4/21/2020
Child of Noble Family (For Jonas)
Child of a Noble Family was made on January 23rd 2019 immediately following the death of Jonas Mekas. The film makes reference to The Bardo Thodol and was intended to help guide Mekas into the next life.
Crew
Directed by Elias ZX
Screenings
Official Selection - Film Diary NYC 2021
Spectacle Theater - “The Videos Are Coming From Inside the House” 4/21/2020
CELEBS GO BOATING //|\\ CLBS BTNG
“The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it.” —Wallace Shawn (The Fever)
Celebs Go Boating, in its simplest form, is my attempt to sedate an episode of reality television. Each shot from s6e1 of the show Celebs Go Dating has been replaced with one frame and held for the duration of the shot. 69496 frames were cut down to 1413 unique images. I took on this project because I thought it would be funny and distract me from more meaningful projects. It was something I could do with my hands, like knitting. As soon as I started cutting Celebs I called it, “the artistic equivalent of a spreadsheet.” This was the kind of work I was craving at the time.
Is there such a thing as meaningless work? I started cutting Celebs partially because I knew the final product would not be worth the time I spent working on it. I should have logged my days but I think I spent 45 hours editing these videos over the course of a month and a half. I did not believe this film would be very good, but I thought it might heal the original television episode. By removing the loud and explosive editing style, maybe I could enhance the shows watchability and draw some connections between experimental filmmaking and reality television. I questioned whether my work would be more important than the original show. I planned to write about lightness and weight: “Does making Celebs Go Dating into a film increase its weight by giving it an ending, locking it into place as a piece of art? Or have I made it lighter by removing 68083 unique frames from the original episode?“ Ultimately I thought the completed film was just as stupid, if not worse, than my starting point. I wasted my time on purpose.
While visiting London in late December I went to the real Celebrity Dating Agency. I was deeply unnerved by the experience. Maybe because the street was so quiet. I associated the location with the loud, bombastic and deeply annoying sounds of the original show. The “Celebrity Dating Agency” plaque was removed from the door. Had the show been cancelled? I didn’t bother to look it up. I was drawn to Celebs Go Dating because of its deep banality. It was built on the flimsiest definition of celebrity. I had no idea who any of its stars were. Why did I make a pilgrimage to its original shooting location? I was disturbed by the places this supposedly meaningless work had taken me.
CLBS BTNG brings back the intensity of the original show. Each shot from Celebs Go Boating is now just a single frame. The audio was sped up to match new runtime. I like this version a lot more. While editing it I kept thinking: “This is a tableau on modern life.” Which probably isn’t true—but it felt good to think it at the time. The existence of a CLBS BTING probably means the original experiment failed.
The credits are left intact in both versions, to pay tribute to the hundreds of people who put thousands of hours into a episode. I’m sure most of them didn’t care about Celebs Go Dating or even like the show. Mind you, they were (mostly) paid for their work and I wasn’t. But the hours spent on set, hours spent combing through hundreds of hours of footage, trying to form a coherent narrative out of it, mean significantly more than the time I spent looking for a decent shot, clicking “frame hold,” extending the shot and moving on to the next one.
“Light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?” —Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)