The line-up for AMAUTEUR Hour, Vol. 1 is WILD. I’m pinching myself. Truly a do-not-miss event. Some of these movies premiered at my favorite festivals. Now they’re coming to our humble little pop-up cinema for one night only. If you haven’t already heard about these filmmakers, you’ll be hearing about them soon.
The event is free with RSVP. Space is limited. Arrive early to get a seat.
Without further ado, here’s the line-up for AMAUTEUR Hour, Vol. 1:
Jack Wedge is a filmmaker, animator, writer based in New York. His work is rooted in speculative fiction, environmental storytelling and world-building, seeking to portray environments not just as settings or backgrounds but as living characters.
Across short films, installations, music videos, and large-scale experiential work, Wedge builds and documents worlds that feel dynamic, researched, and alive.
Jack premiered his film Acid City at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2026 in the Tiger Shorts Competition. It has screened at festivals around the world including, Perspectives Competition at Annecy Festival 2026, Los Angeles Festival of Movies, SIFF, and Filmfest Dresden. Here is an article about the production of the film.
In 2021, Jack co-founded laserdays.studio where he works as a director and animator. Laser Days is signed to Hornet as a director for commercial representation. Here is a portfolio of some recent work.
Will Freudenheim builds games, films, and installations in New York. His work experiments with collective behavior, human-machine collaboration, and speculative worldbuilding through play. He is the co-founder of laserdays.studio and the co-director of Acid City, which premiered at IFFR in 2026.
Carlos Valladares is a writer, director, and critic from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford and received his Masters in History of Art and Film and Media Studies at Yale University in fall 2019. He writes for Gagosian Quarterly, Art in America, n+1, San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, Frieze, MUBI, BOMB, and the Criterion Collection. He is currently working on his first feature, a New York-set romantic comedy.
Josephine Decker is a filmmaker and performer whose work delves into women’s interiority, bending the space between imagination and reality. Her feature film Madeline’s Madeline thrusts the audience into the ever-shifting first-person perspective of her main character. Madeline’s Madeline, scripted through a devised process with ten actors, played Sundance, Berlinale and scores of festivals worldwide, was hailed as a “mind-scrambling masterpiece” (Indiewire) and was nominated for Best Picture at IFP’s Gotham Awards and for two Independent Spirit Awards. Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine’s other feature films have received many accolades: Shirley (starring Elisabeth Moss) won Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking, The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple) was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, and her first two features premiered together at Berlinale 2014 and went on to play scores of festivals worldwide, winning awards and garnering a retrospective at the Torino Film Festival. Her most recent feature Chasing Summer premiered at Sundance 2026 and was Variety’s favorite film of the festival. The comedy feature also played SXSW 2026, as did a short Josephine directed.
She wrote and directed a play with Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia in 2022, which explored complex decisions around pregnancy through a dream lens. Josephine performed from 2008 - 2015 with the Main Squeeze Orchestra, an all-female accordion orchestra in New York City, and she currently performs as part of a clown ensemble in Los Angeles led by Amrita Dhaliwal.
Since 2022, she has been making a documentary in collaboration with teen mothers in Dallas, Texas. Dallas offers limited access to contraception and health insurance and has the highest repeat teen pregnancy rate in the country. The teen mothers Josephine works with improvise, write and act in short films that create the backbone of the doc.
Kristin Slaysman is a graduate of Northwestern University and a LA-based actor, writer, and filmmaker. As an actor, her feature film work has premiered at Berlin, Sundance, Tribeca, and SXSW film festivals, among others. TV credits include: I Love LA, Perry Mason, Parallax. Kristin produced The Icarus Line Must Die, a narrative feature about the East L.A. rock & roll scene, and the dark comedy Dr. Brinks & Dr. Brinks as well as many short films including Potato Potato, which she co-wrote with director Josh Locy, and Bridget Moloney's Blocks - a subject of the L.A. Times' docuseries Journey to Sundance. Recent work includes Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome, and Josephine Decker’s Chasing Summer.
Dane Benko is a filmmaker and video editor from New Mexico, currently based in New York. He is a member of FilmShop, a NY-based film cooperative. He is in the process of releasing his third narrative short film, Shroomery, after making several experimental shorts including the award-winning Sometimes a Figure Grabs Me by the Wrist While I Sleep and Dry Beach.
Sarah Meital Benjamin is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores womanhood, displacement and self-representation.
Her debut short film, Arava (2023), a coming-of-age portrait set within Jerusalem’s punk scene, premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest, where it was nominated for Best International Short. Her photography series, Terminus (2023), received the Albert Londres Prize. Her second short film, Meow (2025), premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival and will play next at SF Jewish.
She is currently developing her debut feature, Angel Rat, and pursuing an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art.
Delilah Napier and Lucy Powers are a writing/filmmaking team, who have made four films together under Drama House Pictures. Their first feature film, Voyeur, which they made for $4,000 while undergraduates at Yale, is now on Amazon Prime and won Best US Feature and Audience Award at the 2020 SoHo International Film Festival. Their short film The Compound won the Special Jury Prize at the Chelsea Film Festival in 2021 and their comedy pilot, Victor Versus the Metaverse, won Best TV Pilot at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Their second feature, Floating Carousel, premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival and won the Ultra Indie Award for Best Narrative Feature. They are represented by UTA and currently developing a feature with Star Thrower Entertainment (King Richard, The Post, Ingrid Goes West).
Julie Halston is the recipient of the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award as well as the AEA Richard Seff Award, Off-Broadway Theater Alliance’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and multiple Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Drama League Award nominations. She is a founding member of Charles Busch’s Theatre-in-Limbo and best known as the beloved Bitsy Von Muffling on the Sex and the City series and films as well as the newest sequel series And Just Like That. She plays the lead role of Mrs. Miller in Lost Cause by Adam Kritzer.
Brandy Burre is best known for her portrayal of Theresa D’Agostino on The Wire. She collaborated with the documentarian Robert Greene to produce the critically acclaimed film Actress. Additional credits include Listen Up Phillip, Good Funk, and Lost Cause.
Bill Bowers has traveled and performed throughout all 50 of the United States, Europe, and Asia. His Broadway credits include Zazu in The Lion King, and Leggett in The Scarlet Pimpernel. His solo plays have been produced Off Broadway and in theatres around the globe. Bill is featured in the films Two Weeks Notice, Before (with Billy Crystal), and Lost Cause.
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