Short Stay

Winner of the Grand Prize at the Jeonju Film Festival in South Korea and the international critics' Fipresci award at IndieLisboa, Short Stay is a delightful and truly economic hour-long debut mini-feature by American multi-hyphenate Ted Fendt. Set and shot largely in his home town of Philadelphia, it's a sardonic love-letter to the "city of brotherly love" that casts a droll comic eye on the foibles of contemporary urban twenty/thirty-somethings. Shooting on 16mm, ardent celluloidophile Fendt introduces an unlikely protagonist in the form of schlubby Mike (Mike MacCherone), who ekes out a living offering tours of Philadelphia's historic centre.

Subletting a friend's room, Mike -- aptly described by The Hollywood Reporter's Jordan Mintzer as "the kind of guy you vaguely knew in high school but never really talked to," drifts through life in a state of hapless disorganisation, equally inept in managing his finances as his romances. Brisk, bracing and often laugh-out-loud hilarious, Short Stay premiered in the edgy Forum section of the Berlinale and was immediately hailed as welcoming an impressive new talent onto the busy American independent scene. Fendt as Mintzer notes,"coaxes believable performances out of both his lead and the rest of the cast, in a movie where nobody seems to be acting yet everyone is acting natural." NY

Ted Fendt (b. 1989) lives in New York, where he works as a translator, subtitler, filmmaker and projectionist at Anthology Film Archives. In 2016 he edited the Austrian Film Museum publication Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, having previously translated several works by the filmmakers in addition to subtitling their films.