Pine Plains Festival of Short Films set for the weekend

PINE PLAINS — Patrick Trettenero is making the final preparations for the Stissing Center’s upcoming Pine Plains Festival of Short Films, set for Saturday, Nov. 1, and Sunday, Nov. 2.

Tickets are still on sale at thestissingcenter.org for $30 per night for adult tickets and $15 per night for student tickets.

The film festival is part of a fundraising effort to purchase film screening equipment for the Stissing Center, Executive Director Patrick Trettenero said.

Currently, the center shows films using a consumer-grade Epson digital projector and a makeshift screen. And although the auditorium’s loudspeaker system is professional, acoustics in the space are more suited for live musical performance than film, Trettenero said.

So he set out on a mission to upgrade, and started using his connections within the center’s Film Advisory Board and the northeast Dutchess County filmmaking community at large to assemble a lineup of films for a charity film fest.

The lineup is a veritable who’s-who of the local filmmaking scene, featuring 10 films by directors and animators from Pine Plains, Stanford, Ancramdale, Poughkeepsie, LaGrangeville and Pleasant Valley.

Filmmakers Murphy Birdsall and Keith Reamer co-directed “Our Farms, Our Farmers,” a documentary on three dairy farms in north Dutchess and south Columbia counties.

They said the project started out with simply filming local family farms for the Little Nine Partners Historical Society in Pine Plains.

“It was much more cut and dry,” Reamer said.

“But then it became a movie,” Birdsall followed.

The film follows life and work on three area farms — Chaseholm, Ronnybrook and Lo-Nan — showing three distinct approaches to the dairy business.

And the farmers got into the challenges they faced, Birdsall said, sometimes emphatically.

“Anything from the price of milk, which can be pretty brutal,” Reamer said, to the ever-expanding collection of milk and dairy alternatives offered at grocery stores.

Other films on the schedule include Brian Gersten’s “Hollywood’s Mermaid: The Esther Williams Story,” animated short “A Cow in the Sky” by C. Fraser Press and Darren Press, “Pete’s Jeeps” by Matt Bartolomeo, “Mr. Marty Pants” by Patrick Trettenero and others over the course of the two nights. Each showing will include a Q&A with the filmmakers.