Emerson Filmmakers Loom Large Over IFFBoston

Two feature-length documentaries and a slew of shorts made by Emerson College alumni, students, and faculty will screen at this year’s Independent Film Festival of Boston from April 27 to May 4.

Asperger’s Are Us, a documentary feature directed by Alex Lehmann ’04, will have its Massachusetts premiere on Friday, April 29, and Best and Most Beautiful Things, directed by Garrett Zevgetis, MA ’05, and produced by Emerson Los Angeles Founding Director Kevin Bright ’76, will screen for the first time in New England on Saturday, April 30. Both films will be shown at the Somerville Theatre.

Asperger’s Are Us is about a comedy troupe of young men with Asperger’s syndrome who are at a crossroads. It previously screened at SXSW in Austin, Texas, in March, where Netflix acquired the distribution rights. Best and Most Beautiful Things—about a young woman who is legally blind and on the autism spectrum and her quest for love and sex—premiered at SXSW.

IFFBoston also will feature two documentary shorts directed by Emersonians. Going the Distance is directed by Visual and Media Arts affiliated faculty member Jessie Beers-Altman, and is about a 100-meter dash for men 75 and older. Dan Albright ’16 and Andy Keyes ’17 directed A Living Wage, about fast food workers’ struggle for a $15 minimum wage. The film recently screened at Emerson as part of the “It’s All True” documentary film festival.

Emerson alumni and students also produced four narrative shorts accepted into the festival.

Aster and Sidney, directed by VMA graduate student Sean Temple, is a post-apocalyptic story of two women and a secret. Another graduate student, Jean-Paul DiSciscio, directed Bloody Henry, about a vampire Bible salesman.

Jesse Kreitzer’s (’07) Black Canaries is a folktale about a turn-of-the-century coal miner who discovers a rare intoxicating mineral and falls in with a secret society as he becomes captive to the earth. Jesse Beecher’s ’07 Balcony Scene will also screen.

For more information, visit iffboston.org.