Lights, camera, action! Inwood Film Festival celebrates 10 years, featuring local Bronxites

Teen romance. Teen angst. Depression. Anxiety. Living in NYC. Growing up in NYC. Nostalgia. Poverty. Struggle. Fame. All themes represented in the 10^th annual Inwood Film Festival, with poignant movies by local filmmakers.

“Nobody is Normal” (2023,) directed and written by Sirin Samman from Kingsbridge, works to erase the stigma behind mental health.  

The movie opens and closes with the sound of a ticking clock, amplifying the passing of time and putting a spotlight on mortality.

The title character, Melody (Gabrielle Manna,) suffers from depression and anxiety, personified by characters in the movie. Depression (Nora Canaday) wears all black and a leather jacket. She seems unaffected by life and mocks everything. Anxiety (June Lienhard) wears fun earrings with a striped long-sleeved shirt and a handkerchief around her neck, her outfit is whimsical, but she’s always frantic and worried about something. The two are like a morbid comedy duo, their interactions are humorous, but their presence is anything but.

Throughout the 19-minute movie, Melody tries to mute the voices who buzz around her like annoying mosquitoes. When nothing seems to work, she resorts to cutting, which quiets them -- for a moment. Her therapist, who she has virtual appointments with, calls her mother (Sioux Madden) into the room to tell her about her daughter’s cutting. Mother and daughter cry in each other’s arms. Mom reaches out to dad for money to pay for Melody’s therapy. Dad says he can’t. Daughter doesn’t know. Mom hides the truth. They both look out the kitchen window and bask in the warm glow of the sunset. Everything is going to be ok.

“It’s semi-autobiographical,” Samman said of her first film. “We want to be all health positive and stuff, but there’s still a very heavy stigma that revolves around mental health.”

The script follows the journey of a mother and daughter navigating the daughter’s mental health, with Samman’s own daughter adding levity to the script with jokes. Like when Melody is trying to leave her apartment while Depression and Anxiety pile coats and even a bicycle helmet onto her, although she’s not riding a bike.

“She hated that I talked about it,” Samman said of discussing her daughter’s depression and anxiety, who was uncomfortable with her mother’s frankness about her mental health struggles. “But I feel like I got through to her. It’s better to be open because you never know who you’re talking to and you might actually empower someone.”

Samman began watching videos on screenwriting and filmmaking during the pandemic and called writing a “therapeutic exercise.”

“Nobody is Normal” was a finalist in the 2023 Big Apple Film Festival.

Natasha Rivera, a fellow participant of the Inwood Film Festival, lives in Spuyten Duyvil and unlike Samman, she is a seasoned writer and director, having worked in the industry for 15 years on notable projects like Amazon Studio’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

She started a company by the name of Boiling River Productions, which has since been rebranded as Picture Story studios. Rivera’s goal is to run an independent studio -- similar to Netflix -- where she can feature movies that tell the stories of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

“When you have a narrative that’s driven by one group of people, then that’s all people have access to,” Rivera told The Press. “I’m all about leveling the playing field and sharing resources and making sure the mic gets passed around to enough people.”

Her movie “Sweet Boys" (2023) takes place throughout the early 2000s of Washington Heights and was featured in the 2024 New York Latino Film Festival. It tells the classic story of boy-meets-girl, then and now. Rafel Hernandez plays the younger boy and Jay Tirado his older counterpart. Jaelynn Martinez-Rosas as the female teenager and Destiny Padilla as her grown-up version.    

Imagery guides the story. Street signs at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and 163^rd Street indicate location. A Nintendo gaming system, a boombox and a flip phone indicate a place in time and a pot of rice and beans and a Puerto Rican flag represent the people in the story.  

“This is a love letter. To East Harlem, to my youth and to all the Sweet Boys society helped to turn into hardened men,” reads a blurb on the movie from the writer.

Throughout the movie, a voice recites spoken word.

“Time and again/we have survived/the most barren/of deserts/morphing and growing/to demand our space,” reads an excerpt from the poem which closes the movie, recited by the female lead in the end.  

“It’s a poem that I wrote a couple years ago that never left my head,” Rivera said. “I got obsessed one day looking at all my elementary and middle school friends on Facebook and seeing where they ended up and it was sad to discover that some of them were either in prison or passed away.”

The poem, much like the movie, tells the story of growing up in the hood and how one can make the choice to grow from it or stay stuck in its grasp. The girl chose to persevere, while the boy – 17 years later – is still on the block, up to no good.

The movie was featured in last year’s New York Latino Film Festival.

“We just wanted to show movies that are culturally relevant for our neighborhood,” Aaron Simms said, founder and executive producer of Inwood Art Works and creator of the Inwood Film Festival. “We really try to listen to people who live here and show what they want to see and who they are as people.”

Simms is a veteran actor who moved to Inwood and was dismayed to find that there were no cultural hubs for artists of the community to gather and share ideas. That’s when Inwood Art Works was born.

The nonprofit helps artists with grants and features creatives from Washington Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill, Spuyten Duyvil, Kingsbridge and Riverdale and has featured upwards of 200 films.

In honor of their 10^th anniversary, this year’s Inwood Film Festival will highlight 10 poignant films throughout the festival’s history, including one from their first iteration, “One Man’s Trash” (2015) directed by Kelly Adams, a story of a sanitation worker who gets too close to his work. And “David Again” directed by Adam Elliott.

“The great story about ‘David Again’ is that it’s a documentary about a guy who lived on Semen Avenue who died during filmmaking,” Simms said.

From May 29 through June 1, the Inwood Film Festival will screen 37 films at the Campbell Sports Center at 505 W. 218^th Street and also hosts seminars for filmmakers. Tickets are $15 per screening or can be purchased in packaged deals by visiting inwoodartworks.nyc.