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As published in the New York Times, from “A Year After the Big Blackout, a Film Festival Flickers to Life” by MELENA Z. RYZIK (Published: August 13, 2004)
Aron Epstein and Daniel Stedman had to create a blackbox, blocking out light, to house their actors.
Luckily, their actors are not very big. Mr. Epstein, 25, and Mr. Stedman, 26, are cousins and co-directors of ”The Moth and the Firefly,” a four-minute film about a moth who becomes attracted to a firefly after the blackout robs the moth of its beloved light source.
As with any epic, casting the hero was the main problem. ”We found that there were plenty of fireflies in Prospect Park and Central Park, but there were very few moths,” Mr. Epstein said. They contacted an entomologist at North Carolina State University, who sent them some packets of moth larvae, which hatched in a cheesecloth covered bucket in Mr. Stedman’s Brooklyn apartment.
”It was actually ideal because we had 25 duplicate moths,” Mr. Epstein said. (Hollywood’s dream come true.)
‘CELEBRATION’ CONTINUES FOR WELLESLEY FILMMAKER
by Catherine Foster, Globe Staff
May 11, 2002
Page: F8 Section: Living
A 6-year-old boy, looking anxious, steps up to a microphone and looks out over a crowd of friends and relatives. He looks at his mother and then announces, “I am a homosexual.”
It’s his coming-out party, and people in the crowd erupt in cheers, shake his hand, or burst into tears. At the end, he looks a bit puzzled. This unconventional 4 1/2-minute film, “Celebration,” has won its young filmmaker a number of worldwide film festival awards and is sending him to the Cannes Film Festival. Heady honors for someone who is only 23 – and who happens to be straight.
Daniel Stedman, who spoke by phone from his home in Wellesley while preparing to leave for France, says his first film is more about identity than sexuality. “I think my film speaks to all audiences, because it’s about the struggle to find your identity in a society that expects that you will put a label on your identity, and then they judge you critically for your decision.”
For a film that’s been out only since August, “Celebration” has achieved fame quickly, winning the award for best American short film at the New York/ Avignon Film Festival, the Teddy Award from the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Audience Award from the Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
Shooting the film took only two days, but casting took two years. “I started in the beginning of my junior year of college,” Stedman says, “but I could not find a family who would let their little boy play the part. I even paid a casting agent.”
The next year he held an audition in New York. ” I rented a studio, put ads in Backstage and Variety, and held what I thought was my all-out audition,” Stedman says. “Two children showed up.”
Perhaps that’s because the ads mentioned something about “adult content.” Still, the 7-year-old Alex H. Krinsky and his mother, Heidi, showed up. Both “were incredible,” Stedman says.
“He’s really intelligent and sophisticated. Here’s a story I tell whenever I’m asked to talk about the film: The morning before the shoot, Alex said, `If it’s hot out and I haven’t taken a bath, I’m going to say I’m a hot, dirty homosexual.’ This is straight out of the mouth of a 7-year-old! I couldn’t believe it!”
Stedman filmed the $9,000 film over two days in late August on the chapel lawn at the Belmont Hill School, which he had attended. Stedman got extras for his crowd scene by walking the streets of Boston and handing out fliers. “That was one of my greatest successes,” he says. “Seventy people arrived on a rainy day.”
They had been lured by the offer of lunch, film credit, and transportation. Did they know what they were cheering about? “No,” Stedman says. “We shot the scene of Alex making his statement separately.”
Most of the reaction to Stedman’s film has been positive, but there are dissenters. “I’ve met people who were upset about it, who thought it was ridiculous, outrageous, who thought it didn’t deserve to be made into a film,” he says.
Stedman also says he doesn’t know much about the psyche of 6-year-olds, or whether self-knowledge would be likely in one so young. “I’ve spoken with psychologists, and they’ve said it’s unlikely or rare. But there are definitely people out there who knew at an early age and who wished that they’d had a ceremony like this. And that is a great example of the ways my film has touched people.”
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com
MAY 1 – BEST SHORT FILM – AUDIENCE AWARD – TURIN, ITALY
Celebration won the Audience Award for Best Short Film at the 17th Turin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Turin hosts the largest and oldest gay and lesbian film festival in all of Europe. The Audience Award is the fourth prize won by Celebration, after the Teddy Award, Best Short in New York and the Kodak Vision Award.
APRIL 21 – BEST AMERICAN SHORT – NEW YORK/AVIGNON FILM FESTIVAL
Daniel Stedman won his second major award, The 21st Century Filmmaker Award for Best American Short at the Avignon/New York Film Festival. He was bestowed with prizes totaling $10,000 from Panavision, DuArt, LTV Laser Subtitling, The New York Observer, Cineric, The Tribeca Film Center, and Kodak. He also received the prestigious “Roger” statuette created by sculptor James Knowles to symbolize independence and creativity, and a Kodak Vision Award.
