Difficult, Funny, and Very Much Alive: What We Mean by That

We've described the films we make as difficult, funny, and very much alive for long enough that it's worth actually explaining what that means. It's not a marketing line. It's a standard we try to hold ourselves to on every project — and it describes the kind of work we're most interested in helping other people make.

Difficult

Not difficult to watch. Difficult in the sense that the film takes something seriously — a subject, a character, a formal problem — and doesn't look away from the complications. Difficult means the film doesn't resolve everything cleanly. It means the ending might be uncomfortable or ambiguous or both. It means the filmmaker trusted the audience enough to not explain everything.

Easy films get made every day. The world doesn't need more of them. Difficult films — films that ask something of the audience, that resist the comfortable interpretation, that make you sit with something after the credits — those are worth the effort. That's what we're trying to make.

Funny

This one surprises people. A lot of serious independent film operates with a studied humorlessness — as if comedy and gravity are incompatible. We think that's wrong, and we think New York City proves it. This city is genuinely, darkly, absurdly funny. The people who live here know it. The films that capture it have an aliveness that somber work rarely achieves.

Funny doesn't mean comedic. It means the work has a relationship with the ridiculousness of being alive in this particular city at this particular moment. It means the filmmaker has a sense of humor about their own subject matter even when the subject is serious. That quality — a kind of ironic tenderness — is one of the things that distinguishes the best New York films from the merely good ones.

Very much alive

This is the hardest one to define and the easiest to recognize when it's there. A film that's very much alive feels like it was made by someone who cared about making it, on a day when something real was at stake, with people who brought their whole selves to the set. You can feel the energy of a production in the final cut. A tired crew making an indifferent film produces footage that looks like exactly that, no matter how good the equipment was.

New York City helps with this. The city doesn't allow passivity. If you point a camera here and something isn't happening, something will happen to you anyway. The aliveness is ambient — and the best productions absorb it and put it on screen.

Why all three matter together

Any two without the third produces something incomplete. Difficult and alive without funny produces work that's exhausting. Funny and alive without difficult produces work that's entertaining but forgettable. Difficult and funny without alive produces work that's clever but cold. Together, they describe a film that takes itself seriously without taking itself too seriously, that's made with care and with humor, that has something genuine inside it. That's the target. We don't always hit it. But it's what we're aiming at every time.

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