(soft music) (upbeat music) - Welcome back to "TVFilm."

I'm your host, Jermaine Wells.

"TVFilm" is a showcase of short films made by upstate New York media makers across all genres.

This season we have a lot of films about parenting and all that comes with it, the love, the challenges, the grief, and the joy.

We're going to start tonight's episode with "I Was Here" by Noelle Gentile.

This film, based on true events, features two parents reeling after their young child receives a devastating medical diagnosis.

They turn to a retired grief counselor and something within them begins to crack and let in the faintest of lights.

Let's watch.

(wind blowing) (wind whooshing) (wind whooshing continues) - Sorry, I didn't realize it was so far out here.

(wind blowing) - [Jonah] Yeah.

- [Elle] I think this is it up here.

- [Jonah] It's just like a house.

- [Elle] Yeah, it is.

(blinker beeping) (knocking on door) - Welcome.

- [Elle] Thank you.

- [Counselor] Make yourselves comfortable.

I'll be right back.

(kettle whistling) (soft piano notes) We had 13 years with Adrian.

- [Jonah] I'm so sorry.

- [Counselor] I'm so glad you came.

- We've never done anything like this.

- What was it like to leave your son home tonight?

- Um, well, it's pretty terrifying.

Um, and it's also, it feels a little bit like a relief, too.

Yeah, I don't know.

I like being in the car so, I like watching people's houses, you know, and, um, I don't know, thinking about their dinner parties and drinks they're having, I don't know, movies they're watching.

Yeah, it's just like these little floating scenes.

- Are you able to do anything for yourselves?

- [Both] No.

- Except... - What?

- [Elle] Well, he's a, you're, he's an incredible dancer.

- Oh, God.

I like to do interpretive dances for them.

It's awful.

- It's awful.

Coming here was a lot.

- What did you imagine was happening inside my home when you drove up?

- I guess I just thought we have to come inside.

(wind blowing) - [Counselor] My son made that.

Do you like it?

- I do.

I made one just like it when I was a boy.

I loved how there was this whole other world in there.

I imagined all sorts of adventures.

- [Counselor] Are your adventures quite different than you imagined as a child?

- (Jonah laughs) Very.

- [Counselor] What do you see in there?

- My son Kai and I, that night we almost lost him.

I decided to tie my boat to his.

- [Counselor] Do your boats look like that?

- They're smaller and they don't have sails.

- What's the sea like?

- [Jonah] I'm just trying desperately to get the water out of our boats.

- [Counselor] What if something does happen to Kai's boat?

- Then I go down with him.

- [Counselor] Then what about Elle?

- My boat is tied to Kai's.

- [Counselor] How does that help you?

- It doesn't matter.

Just the hand we've been dealt.

(exhales) (water trickling) (Jonah exhales) (door knob rattling) (footsteps clomp) - [Counselor] So where do you go from here?

- Sorry, so well, well we are, we are running out of the, we are running out of meds to try.

But we have another specialist to see next week.

So yeah, we'll see what they have to say.

- [Counselor] How old is your Kai?

- [Elle] He's seven.

- [Counselor] I remember seven.

Would you tell me about him?

- He's... (laughing) He's spectacular.

(paper crinkling) (wind blowing) (wipers clicking) (Elle exhales) (seat belt clicks) Just one more minute.

(car door closes) (soft music) (Elle crying) (soft music) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft piano music) - Ready, Isla?

Start pedaling!

- [Adult] Ready to rock and roll, go for it!

- [Caregiver] Push your feet, whoo!

(soft music) - My name is Noelle Gentile and my film is "I Was Here."

My film "I Was Here" is about a couple grappling with a life-altering medical diagnosis for their child.

My film is based on my family's personal experience.

My oldest daughter has a newly discovered rare genetic disorder.

Her neurologist said to us that she was at risk for SUDEP, which is sudden unexpected death in a person with epilepsy.

We were really grappling with how do you live your ordinary day-to-day life while having what felt like our child's life in the balance?

Like was she going to wake up in the morning?

Every single night, every single morning waking up with that fear.

And a friend that I taught theater with, my friend Ward, suggested we go see a grief counselor.

It was sort of a life-altering visit with this woman.

You know how occasionally you meet someone, you only meet them once, you have this very deep, soulful exchange and it sort of pivoted our trajectory.

She said, "What if you're not in control of her life's journey, her soul's purpose, how long she's meant to be here?"

And when someone asks a question like that, it just re-frames everything.

It's very hard as a parent when your child has medical needs to realize that you are not ultimately in control of everything.

There's elements of it that are just out of your hands.

Filmmaking has been a place for me to process the things that have happened in my life, to process emotional events that I've experienced.

One of the things that was really important to me to convey, it was this idea that there was still space for joy as we were going through one of the most trying periods of our life.

One day I was like walking around in my neighborhood and I was standing looking at the trees and the sky and I just had this overwhelming feeling like I could start crying thinking about, this overwhelming feeling like I'm here.

I'm here, like I'm alive.

I'm here on this planet.

Jonah, he goes up there into the grief counselor's child's bedroom and you see this whole life and this whole world in there and you know that she's carried on, right?

And for Jonah, it'll be okay because our stories are not what we anticipate them to be.

And what it is, is what we make of them.

And I think that's it.

I think it's like having witnessed someone else who had loss and feeling that mutuality in their stories and seeing if that is ultimately what happens, that there's a way forward.

It's not so much the length of a person's life, but like the impact of it and that they were there and they really lived.

(bright music) - Tonight's second film is the other side of the parenting coin.

Grief can stem from love, care, and concern, but so does joy.

In "Dance Film," director Kelly Gallagher playfully upends the traditional focus of avant-garde choreography films by turning the attention onto the spectator of a dance.

This film is about the act of watching and what it means to look at someone with love, tenderness, and openness.

Let's take a look.

(baby banging hands) (baby happily screaming) (baby cooing) (Background shuffling/footsteps) (baby grunting) (Background footsteps) (baby screeching) (kissing noises) (baby giggling) - My name is Kelly Gallagher and my film this season is called "Dance Film."

Dance Film is a short rotoscope animation of my daughter watching me dance around the kitchen.

This film was the very first short film that I finished and completed after giving birth to my daughter in the summer of 2024.

Making this short, tiny film was really me wanting to in part prove to myself that the artist in me was in fact still very much alive and still there and still me even after becoming a mother.

So in terms of the aesthetic of the film, I love working with my hands.

So many of my films are what I call like handcrafted.

They're, you know, really tactile processes made with paper and materials.

I took video of my daughter while I was dancing in the background and then I printed out many, many pictures.

So I printed out four images of her per page for many pages.

And I used crayons and just, you know, colored on top of the black and white frames of hers that I had printed out.

And it was a really, honestly, like a really cathartic and therapeutic and joyful process.

And I just did that for however many mornings until I had about 68 seconds' worth of material to, you know, to make my movie with.

My hope is that the joy sort of like bounds off the screen.

And I don't know, this sounds cheesy, but that people kind of feel that joy.

I think tragically there's a lot of violence in the world right now and I think a lot about children.

There's this quote that I really love by Nelson Mandela.

I'm going to paraphrase it, but he said, "You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats its children."

To watch the joy of a child, a happy, healthy child, you know, for 68 seconds, maybe it gets people thinking about the children in their own lives that they might know and to think about what is their joy worth and how are we working towards building a world where all children can be happy and healthy and smiling and joyful?

- To check out more films and filmmaker interviews, you can visit wmht.org/tvfilm.

Don't forget to follow WMHT on social media and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Thanks for tuning in.

I'm Jermaine Wells and I'll see you next week.

(bright music) - [Narrator] "TVFilm" is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.