In preparation for the upcoming Austin Film Festival, taking place October 18 th
through the 25th, Austin Lifestyle has begun scoping out some of the more under-
the-radar participants for whom we are most excited about. To introduce the talents
of writers/directors Andrew Tilley and Zach Endres, we’ve taken a pre-festival look
at each of their short films.
Incident at Public School 173
As soon as that chalkboard-typeface introduction smacks onto the title
screen of Incident at Public School 173, we get a feel for the battalion-esque
paradigm of youthful turmoil that we’re about to see.
Set at the epoch of burgeoning adolescence, the 12 and a half-minute film
takes place in a middle school cafeteria. It’s lunchtime, and we’re introduced
immediately to that folkloric vulgarity of the public school lunch; however, the
plastic-y cheese and watery taco meat are only foreshadowing visuals to what lies
ahead.
We meet the main character, a brunette early onset-heartthrob, sharing a
lunchroom table with his cohort, a classic “sidekick” type, complete with a freckled
face and a mature rationale. As our main character decides to approach the damsel
of his affection, he accidentally knocks a peer into a tray, “fatally” catapulting a
burger onto the back of a girl’s head. This unintentional brutality plays catalyst to
the rest of the tale, in which unravels a conquest of novice romance amongst the
treachery of a cafeteria-wide food fight.
The most endearing aspect of the film is its characters. The portrayals by
Chayce Wellings, Alia Elle Vinson, Caleb Burgess and Wes Jensen, among the other
young actors, are examples of combined incredible talent and casting-accuracy;
tween girls loudly gesticulate, a bully-type grimaces with antagonist scowls, our
damsel-of-affection innocently plays seductress of the mind, and the pair of main
cohorts evoke juvenile passion and mental distress, respectively. However
hyperbolized it may be, there’s an impressive overall naturalness to the story’s
progression.
Playing with the rate of motion, writer and director Andrew Tilley creates
renditions of classically familiar scenes, ones reminiscent of forlorn reconciliations,
life-or-death dodges of ammunition, compatriot demise, or grueling triumph over
antagonism, bringing the hopeful cascade of rampant young vehemence to a placid,
endearing, and quite sloppy conclusion.
The Teleported Man
Our protagonist wears his orange jumper the entire sequence of events,
never failing to allude to his conviction. Of what he has been convicted for, we begin
to find out as he is taken back into his own vulnerable past and faced with a prior-
reality that, potentially, he could have the power to alter.
In The Teleported Man, writer and director Zach Endres creates a science-
fiction, eerily-dystopian scenario in which one man is given the option to undergo a
potentially fatal scientific experiment—to become the subject for the first ever
human teleportation attempt. The 12 and a half-minute film is thoroughly laden
with emotionality and desolation on the part of its main character, torn and faded in
the present, and consequentially brought to an equally as distressing past. The film
is enhanced by interactions with the secondary characters, especially in those of the
man’s son, whose brief but thoroughly sincere depiction by the young Matthew
Pogonat is telling of a prodigy performer. To further praise Tim Waggoner, who
plays the convict, he powerfully enlivens his protagonist with a raw, stoic,
suppressed sensitivity, dragging himself (and the viewer) composedly through a
wrenching reconciliation with his own being.
The penultimate scene of the film is its most visceral. In the past, our
convict’s history having come to fruition, he reaches his barest moment through a
discreetly inflective emission of song. The song, whose familiar tune illustrates a
budding love story, contrastingly serves to create an authentically desperate, almost
emotionally macabre point in the chilling narrative.
These films are both produced by Irene Georghiades, each with coinciding teams of
great, Austin-based talent behind them. Submitted as student-done thesis films, they
were chosen by AFF to screen as narrative shorts. The prestige of this categorization
is appropriate for the teams of young professionals and their productions, whose
debuts we are much-anticipating. The screening schedules for The Teleported Man
and Incident at Public School 173 are as follows:
Teleported
Shorts Program 8 – THE FUTURE NOW
●Friday, October 19th at 9:30PM – Hideout Theatre
●Sunday, October 21st at 7:45PM – Alamo Village
Incident
Shorts Program 3 – Postcards from the Battlefield
●Sunday, Oct 21 at 7:15PM – Hideout Theatre
●Tuesday, Oct 23 at 9:30PM – Hideout Theatre
To plan your Austin Film Fest viewing schedule and check out the festival’s carnival
of goings-on, visit www.austinfilmfestival.com.
