SHIVA BABY Kicks Off WFF Summer Event Season

Photo by Zach Bell.

Last week we hosted our first in-person event of 2021: an outdoor screening of Emma Seligman’s black comedy SHIVA BABY at the newly redone Bearsville Center located just outside our hometown of Woodstock, New York. The screening was powered entirely by solar energy courtesy of our friends Austin and Jess at Oscillation Transia.

SHIVA BABY, which stars comedian, actor and writer Rachel Sennott as a soon-to-be college graduate trapped at a painfully awkward funeral after party with her secret sugar daddy and overbearing relatives, originally screened at the 2018 Woodstock Film Festival as a short before it was expanded into a feature-length film. The new adaptation received rave reviews from critics for its sharp humor and claustrophobic tension with Jason Bailey from The New York Times writing: “It's rare for a film to simultaneously balance such wildly divergent tones, to interweave big laughs with gut-wrenching discomfort, but Seligman pulls it off.”

Attendees cozying up on the lawn before the show. Photo by Zach Bell.

SHIVA BABY producers Katie Schiller (left) and Kieran Altmann (center) with WFF Co-Founder & Executive Director Meira Blaustein (right). Photo by Zach Bell.

Guests enjoyed a mercifully cool summer night, settling on the Bearsville Center lawn with blankets and chairs under the warm glow of string lights hanging from nearby trees. Some audience members took advantage of the early check-in time by visiting the nearby Little Bear Café, The Bear Cantina and Nancy’s Artisanal Creamery for pre-show drinks and dinner. SHIVA BABY producers Katie Schiller and Kieran Altmann made the journey upstate from Brooklyn to introduce the film and host a Q&A session. Katie and Kieran elaborated on the project’s origins as an undergrad thesis film created during director Emma Seligman’s senior year at NYU before delving into the creative choices they made when developing the feature-length version. The producers noted that while certain cast members from the short were replaced or reappeared as cameos, the SHIVA BABY team took extra care to ensure the film’s core narrative of a young woman experiencing a lifetime’s worth of lessons in one afternoon remained intact.

SHIVA BABY is available to watch now on demand. Thank you to everyone who attended!

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