By Grace Moses ‘29

The 2025 Woodstock Film Festival will run Oct. 15 to 19 in Woodstock, New York. Among a slate of feature-length narrative films, documentaries and shorts programming is a selection of Film School Shorts.

“I always tell audiences,” says Amanda Naseem, Head Shorts Programmer, “do not sleep on the Film School shorts!… Time and time again, the films that are submitted as student films are super high-quality… These are people who are studying film, who are currently immersed in creating high quality films and telling stories.”

Six short films were selected for the category: “Are You Having Fun?” by Nicole Cone; “Dawn’s World” by Natalie Mora Horberg; “Hotspot” by Hudson Price; “How I Learned to Die” by Manya Glassman; “St. Joe’s Hoes” by Khushali Haji; and “The Wrath of Othell-Yo!” by Kwesi Jones.

“Are You Having Fun?” began as Nicole Cone’s graduate thesis project when she was at New York University, inspired by her real-life bachelorette party in 2022.

“Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Cone said. “Two girls got Covid before we got there, the first Airbnb had termites, the second… Someone… tried to rob us. Nightmare after nightmare.” Cone’s sister admired their ability to rally and keep trying to have fun, and Cone shared in her appreciation. “Are You Having Fun?” is “an exploration of friendship, a love letter to my friends,” she says.

“I enjoy comedies,” Cone adds. “I feel like the world is hard enough. I like my movies to ask questions, but ultimately I’m trying to make people laugh as well.”

Cone studied communications for her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. She stayed in media for five years, finding a niche in documentary production. When she decided to apply for NYU’s graduate program for narrative film, it was because she believed that she “kind of always had an itch for narrative.”

“Enjoy the process,” Cone says to newer filmmakers. “Don’t be afraid to live life … Go on dates, go travel, go get a boring desk job even if it’s just six months. I think life experiences create better films.”

Cone is still involved in documentaries, and worked as a producer on “Simone Biles Rising” last year. She feels “blessed to be working in both worlds, because [she feels] like they really inform each other. It kind of keeps the creative juices flowing, hopping back and forth.”

Khushali Haji, director of “St. Joe’s Hoes,” is also a documentary filmmaker, and “St. Joe’s Hoes” also began as her graduate thesis project. She studied urban design as an undergraduate in India, where she realized she wanted to be involved in something more public-facing than academic research. She moved to New York to study international journalism and documentary filmmaking at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

While looking for a place to live, she came across Saint Joseph’s Immigrant Home, a former convent that had been converted into housing for women near Times Square that is “open to women, to artists, and dancers and creatives who are trying to find affordable housing in New York.” She met and lived with several women, many of whom, like Haji, were also pursuing artistic careers. “That’s where the story started,” she says. “A group of women from different places from all over the world. People who sometimes couldn’t even speak in the same language to one another but somehow had to communicate.”

“It’s such an oddball group of young artists trying to make it in the city … and it’s such an interesting place that they meet up,” Naseem says.

“How do you make a family, how do you get a support system?” Haji asks. She remained close friends with the women in the film after her thesis was complete, so she was able to keep working with them to finish the film on minimal resources.

“There were challenges about how they… wanted to be shown,” Haji says. During the making of the film, she noticed a journalistic urge within herself to “get the story and get the best part of it that [she could],” but recognized that she had to take a step back to respect the women’s vulnerability in making the film. She adds that "it's so much easier to be behind the camera than in front of it, and you have to recognize that. It was really humbling in that way.”

Tickets are available at https://woodstock2025.eventive.org/passes/buy to attend the Woodstock Film Festival.

World Premieres at the Woodstock Film Festival