Buffalo Film: Movie is classic festival fare — stylish and character driven

By Elmer Ploetz

“Stationed at Home,” featured tonight (Oct. 14) in the Buffalo International Film Festival, is the kind of movie that film festivals are made for.

Shot stylishly in black and white with an ensemble cast of actors whom the roles were written for, the film is the feature film debut as a writer for Daniel Masciari, with strong production credits from Buffalo-area crew members.

The film will be screened at 6:45 p.m. at the North Park Theatre (1428 Hertel Ave., Buffalo). writer/director/editor Masciari will be there, along with producer/actor Eliza VanCort and many of the cast and crew.

This writer hasn’t seen the film yet, so we’ll relay the storyline as described in the film notes: “On a clear and frigid Christmas Eve in 1998, in a small, forgotten city, a solitary taxi driver on the graveyard shift breathlessly awaits the sight of the International Space Station. As the hours count down, a parade of offbeat misfits derail his plans, propelling the story to its exhilarating climax. In this poetic, hilarious and often absurd tale, complete strangers discover unexpected unity and a newfound understanding of their place among the stars.”

In the trailer, the city looks for all the world like Buffalo in all of its gray and dismal nighttime winter glory. But it could have been any upstate New York city.

In an interview Monday with Masciari and VanCort, they said it was filmed entirely in Binghamton over a span of 15 days. But with editing, visual effects, sound mixing, sound design and all of the processes that go into making a movie, it took about a year and a half.

Masciari said he knew from the start he wanted to go with black-and-white.

“When I first got the idea of the film, on a bus in Binghamton, N.Y. … I was listening to “Dusk,” by Duke Ellington, and something about listening to that music in the winter and looking at this old abandoned train station, it just looked like black and white to me,” Masciari said. “And the City of Binghamton also has this incredible, vast architecture, and it’s pretty desolate. So there’s something about that combination.

“I knew with the cinematographer I was working with, Jackson Jarvis … we just thought the textures of the city would really come about in black-and-white.”

He said the black-and-white brought out the subtlety of the actors’ performances as well.

And the film was indeed shot in the cold of a Binghamton winter.

The film itself has Ithaca roots, and Masciari was going there to visit VanCort when he came up with the idea for the film. She had been his acting teacher with the Actors Workshop of Ithaca (specializing in the Meisner Technique, which involves focusing on the actors around them) and served as one of three producers (along with Buffalo-based Bethany Hedges and Matt Fleck).

Several of the actors were people Masciari had worked with before, with additional roles for Jamie Donnelly (who was in the original “Rocky Horror Picture Show” cast in Los Angeles and on Broadway as well as in both the film and Broadway versions of “Grease”) and Misty Monroe (a former member the Los Angeles Groundlings troupe).

Masciari said he wrote roles specifically with actors in mind.

“As I was getting the idea for the film, I was imagining people that I had worked with in our acting class. And so I started writing them,” he siad. “They were basically my muses, and I was getting ideas for them in this world. And so most of the actors, most of the leads, are people that I wrote the parts for because I was so inspired by them.

“I just I knew that they could connect with the wavelength of the film, and their faces are just incredible, in addition to their talent. … I knew too that the film had such a has a coldness to it, because it’s black-and-white in the winter in Binghamton. And so I wanted a warmth from the these characters.”

One review said the film had the makings of “alternative holiday classic.”

VanCort said, “My sort of blunt take on that is that anything that isn’t a multimillion dollar picture that 18 people sat around and decided with focus groups what film they should make to make a lot of money is going to be labeled an alternative Christmas film. So we just sort of leaned into that.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s that alternative. I think art is timeless and it’s a beautiful artistic film, but I think in terms of where it’s being positioned in the market, this is for people who really like film and don’t necessarily want to see ‘Terminator 85’ … people who actually want to see something that’s a little bit more original than perhaps that.”

Elmer Ploetz is editor-in-chief of The Buffalo Hive. This story was written in collaboration with an interview conducted by the Arts Journalism class at SUNY Fredonia.