Obviously abstract, obscure, and a bit tilted, the Ridgewood Off Kilter Film Festival does what any nationally recognized screening event would do for filmmakers across multiple genres and brings them to an artist haven in Queens.
The venue chosen for the four-day-long event, the Stone Circle Theatre, mostly dedicated to faith and theatrical performances, gave way to a multiverse of films spanning numerous genres.
From Friday, Sept. 13 to Sunday, Sept. 15, hundreds of participants sat in waiting for their work to show on the ROFF big screen (quite literally) filling the theater intermittently with greater conversations and celebrations about the filmmaking industry itself.
In fact, 14 animated shorts, 13 live-action shorts, 10 short documentaries and 17 music videos followed Thursday’s mixer and well throughout Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. The run times for each film in every category varied from as short as one minute to as long as 15 minutes, played with some brief intermissions in between.
In its ultimate form, what ROFF does better than anyone else is give a platform to the under-appreciated yet familiar styles of filmmaking that gained much of their popularity in communities that were once considered small and weird.
Only a few out of the many featured works would be awarded with a ROFF award at the second film festival of its history. In the end, those who took home an award had done so under some straight forward and off-kilter reasons by the film festival’s selection committee.
The live-action short, “The Soul Snatcher” took home the Most Disturbing Prosthetics Award at the start of the awards ceremony, highlighting the creative use of prosthetics in Directors Biff Hartwell and Mitchell PollittR’s work about a group of debaucherous youngsters punished for their sins after unearthing a priests’ skeleton.
Among the many lasting visuals of The Soul Snatcher is the use of what one of the directors named the “drill-do,” which was essentially a dildo rigged to spew out blood through the use of a drill, some tubing and some handiwork.
Up next on the docket, the ROFF Most Relatable Protagonist Award went home to a Ridgewood/Glendale resident who could not say the same about a key character in her short documentary, “Goodbye Slim Jim.” Director Sarah Bex Rice joyfully received the award for her work, reflecting on a dark time in her life when the only constant seemed to be a pet roach she bought on Myrtle Avenue, as a joke.
“I think I learned a lot from it in terms of I thought it was just this thing I had, and I actually was keeping it alive. It was there for me through a lot of shit. So yeah, go out and buy a bug,” Rice shared as she accepted her award.
Moving right along, the Best Voiceover Performances award went to the animated short, “The Mind-Bottle Problem,” by Director Wyatt Bertz. His work reflects what would happen if a sentient bottle of nail polish went to a therapist, that happens to be a cell phone with a face and wings, and began searching for answers about its existence.
Most notably, a popular TikTok text-to-speech voice, sounding a lot like Rocket Raccoon from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie franchise, was used for the phone character. The mispronunciation of certain words and enunciation of some acronyms generated hilarious moments for the short.
ROFF also recognized one outstanding music video that had an entire family involved in its making, “Nose,” by Director and Musician Qiang Chen. The ROFF screen served as the first time for Chen in the New York City, earning the ROFF award for best family project.
The music video, with vocals sung by Chen and his daughter, represents a larger message to the public to advocate for cleaner air quality wherever they life.
“The air in the city I used to live in was very bad in winter. Another year, I went to Germany to create and live for a period of time. The air in Germany was still very good in winter, but my family members in my hometown city frequently suffered from respiratory diseases, so I wrote this song and sang it with my daughter,” Chen shares in the music video description. “I hope you can protect the air in your hometown to protect our big blue planet.”
Jeremy Finch presented the final awards of the night, starting with the ROFF Best Homage to Princess Diana. The obvious winner, “My Imaginary Life For Someone,” took home the prize and although Director Molly Wurwand said her co director Ryan could not be in attendance, he was with her in spirit, as well as Princess Diana.
The final double award for the best use of pizza and the use of the word “frim” went to “ZIPWHARF.” Perhaps it was the London charm of the director and cast that secured the award among the other artists at the Off Kilter Festival, with eerily familiar and satirical jabs at current social media content creator culture. Regardless, ROFF knows best when it comes to the obviously abstract, obscure and a bit tilted.
A musical performance from “Taxi Vision,” a transatlantic poly garage pop band, accompanied the end of the second Ridgewood Off Kilter Film Festival in its history, while artists and filmmakers basked in their victories and the opportunity to have their work shown in Ridgewood.
As sad as it is to see the end of the festival, there is comfort in knowing that it is only a goodbye for now, with more filmmakers already looking forward to the same event next year.
