Synopsis:
'I am going to have you read from a collection of my spam emails,' The director explains as she ushers actors from Craigslist one-by-one into an audition room. The actors and the director together attempt to breathe life into lifeless, manipulative, malicious, and nonsensical email dialogue in an attempt to realize and humanize the digital and inhumane. All is revealed to the viewer; The slate, light stands, teleprompter, a boom operator, film equipment litters the audition room floor, a cow pasture, a sunset, a strip club. Is this poetry or malware? 

Personal Statement:
At the time of production, this short film was my most ambitious yet. I was directing a full crew. I had cast over 15 actor. I had four location. It was my first time working with the production company, MEMORY, whom I would go on to collaborate with on well into the future. Hi I Need To Be Loved is the film that I am most proud of to date. I approached this film from a place of complete freedom. I took inspiration from the world around me, the internet, literature, my personal relationships, dreams, films, and wove them together into an experiemental short film that I felt not only represented me as a filmmaker and artist, but also a person. I focused on strengthening relationships within my crew members and actors. I wanted to explore Baltimore and the county and express it through film. I wanted life and music to coalesce through the workings of Dan Deacon and his collaboration with my moving image and the Mind on Fire orchestra. I wanted Hi I Need To Be Loved to celebrate all of this through the language of film. 

Written and Directed by: Marnie Ellen Hertzler
Original Score: Dan Deacon
Director of Photography: Corey Hughes
Executive Producers: Riel Roch-Decter and Sebastian Pardo
Edited by: Albert Birney 

Official Selections/Screenings:
2019 Rotterdam International Film Festival
2019 London Short Film Festival
2018 Locarno Film Festival
2018 Vancouver International Film Festival
2018 El Gouna Film Festival
2018 Valdiva Film Festival
2018 New Orleans Film Festival
2018 Denver Film Festival
2019 London Short Film Festival

Press:
Medium: Experimental Shorts Highlights NOFF - 2018
The New Orleans Advocate: 7 Must See Films at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival - 2018

(2018, 11 min.)

Synopsis:
Utilizing unconventional animation platforms, and stock photo characters, Growing Girl is a animation that explores the form and setting of office culture, the reclamation of an empowered female identity, and a remedy for the internalization of an all-too-common social conflict.

 

A PowerPoint presentation about snakes and all of the things I wish I would have done. 

As well as being projected in a theatrical setting, Growing Girl has been performed in front of a live audience as a PowerPoint presentation would be in a business meeting or conference using a live score and dialogue. 

Personal Statement:
Growing Girl was the first film where I directed an actor within my practice. It was also the first film in my career where I received success in the film festival circuit. Because of the success of this film, my career took a turn for the better. I met the producers that currently work with my on my feature films. I formed relationships with festival programmers that have since supported my work and brought it into the public eye. Most importantly, I found my voice as a director and artist. I learned the importance and magic of a director/actor relationship and what nurturing that relationship can produce better art over time. My relationship with the actress in this animation, Isobel Arnberg, is still alive and strong today. She continued to appear in two more of my short films after this one and I look forward to what we will create together in the future. 

Not only was Growing Girl important for my immediate career, it also showed me the importance and power in being open and honest within my work.

Directed/Animated - Marnie Ellen Hertzler
Sound/Original Score - Dan Deacon
Original Poetry - Maya Martinez
Producers - Jillian Mayer, Matt Porterfield
Starring - Isobel Arnberg
Additional Animation - Albert Birney

Official Selections/Screenings
2019 Museum of Modern Art New York
2018 Oak Cliff Film Festival
2018 Indie Grits Film Festival
2018 Florida Film Festival
2018 Ann Arbor Film Festival
2017 Borscht Film Festival
2017 Maryland Film Festival
2017 New Orleans Film Festival
2017 Cucalorus Film Festival

Press:
Good Short Films: Growing Girl - 2018

(2016, 11 min.)

Synopsis:
Made in collaboration with visual artist, Beth Hoeckel, Green Water is a collaged animation using archival magazine photography and advertizements to create a domestic world in which a woman travels through rooms in search of the perfect easter basket. Utilizing mid-century and 1960s imagery and color pallets, a imaginary space is created with simple movements, rich sound design, and a linear narrative. Green Water is subtle yet impactful story telling through collage and animation. Easter is here and things are getting strange. 

Personal Statment:
Green Water is indicative of the style of animations that I was making in my career at this moment in time. This particular animation is a personal milestone in my career because it began my passion and focus on deep collaboration within my work. Through my collaboration with Beth Hoeckel, I learned that my practice was enhanced by the conversation and skills that other artists and people bring to a project. After the completion of this animation, I began to seek out regular collaborations within my practice. I also began to focus on the documentary format, incorporating real life, conversation, and people into the form and story of my work. 

Directors: Marnie Ellen Hertzler and Beth Hoeckel
Animation: Marnie Ellen Hertzler
Collage: Beth Hoeckel
Sound Design: Albert Birney

Official Selection Maryland Film Festival 2017

(2017, 2 min.)

Synopsis:
The Domestic Life of a Housecat is a study of hindsight. I, the filmmaker, play the invisible lead as I send the audience rifling through a two-year history of voicemails, and various relics of lost love. Using animation and found images, I pieces together this video as I find my footing after months disoriented by regret and spite. What was once such an intimate and desperate pursuit is now rewound and repackaged as a cinematic peek into the absurdity and ephemera of romantic love.

Personal Statment:
After years of working art department for films, fabricating Mardi Gras floats, commissioned and collaborative stop-motion animation works, this short film is my first independent film work. It is also my first time collaborating with a composer, directing actors, and editing. Though this work is different from the films I create today,  I see it as a the short film that jumpstarted my passion for working as an independent filmmaker and began my career as a director. 

Official Selection, 2016 Maryland Film Festival
Official Selection, 2016 Seattle Transmedia and Independent Film Festival

Producer - Matthew Porterfield
Sound Design - Matt Papich

(2016, 4 min.)

Deep Dark is an ongoing series that draws inspiration from suppressed memories, collected secrets, alleged rumors, and personal confessions. Deep Dark acts as an interpretive document of these stories and retells them through symbols, sound, and animation.

Episode 1: Josie and Jade
A plant that grows unusually large and prolific due to its nurturer’s strange secret
(2014, 3 min.)

Episode 2: No Parents
A biographical exploration of small freedoms, boyhood, and unadulterated curiosity
Official Selection, 2015 New Orleans Film Festival
Official Selection, 2015 Cucalorus Film Festival
(2015, 5 min.)

Deep Dark Books: My House
A reading from a book for children by children
(2014, 2 min.)

Dream Throat hotel room installation: Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans 2014 (Prospect 3+, New Orleans)


Synopsis: Welcome to a room that has hosted numerous tenants. This room is a collector of dreams, aggression, love, lust, and pain. You are the subject of it's experiment as you participate in a brief document of these particular collected occurrences. The tenants change while the stiff taxidermy and rose wallpaper remain as viewers like yourself. You are invited to an in depth and darkened view of what these thorns have collected. Here, stories stain the floor and soak into the mattress of a room we like to call Dream Throat

Dream Throat is an immersive, touring,  installation. Written, shot, and edited all in one room, this film installation focuses on the visitor’s relationships within a singular, yet dynamic space. Because the setting of both the film and the installation is a hotel room, a hypothetical mirror is created, allowing the viewer to actively experience the film as a situation, rather than passively view it as a spectator in a theatre.

Other installation locations:
Miami, Florida (Borscht Film Festival) 2015
Tampa, Florida (Gasparilla Film Festival) 2015
Glasgow, Scotland (Glasgow Short Film Festival) 2015
Baltimore, Maryland (Maryland Film Festival) 2015
Wilmington, North Carolina (Cucalorus Film Festival) 2015

(2014)

Synopsis:
In a world that undulates between fact and fiction, digital and physical, the last people alive on earth are a group of Soundcloud rappers living a solitary existence in the desert town of Crestone, Colorado. Once a religious and spiritual mecca for many, Crestone creates a compelling cinematic backdrop of endless sand dunes, waterfalls, and dark caves juxtaposed with images of tattooed bodies, cosplay wardrobes, and clouds of marijuana smoke. When the rappers are visited by a hometown friend, they decide to make a movie together. This movie is a love letter. This movie is about the end of the world. 

Personal Statement:
The objective of this feature-length film is to capture the lives of a specific, contemporary subculture of people from both the view of their front-facing iPhone cameras, and from the view of a cinematic lens. By quietly imposing an apocalyptic narrative onto their actual daily lives, alarmingly, the only element that changes is the genre. Their brotherhood, in reality becomes a necessity for survival. Their escape into the world they have created for themselves within their music becomes a coping mechanism in the face of the inevitable end of all things. This film portrays them for both who they seem to be and who they really are: a group of young men supporting each other and building lives that revolve around music, leisure, and their unwavering pursuit of happiness.

The cast and I are old friends and acquaintances from our high school years in North Carolina. Because of this already long-established relationship, CRESTONE is naturally collaborative in nature. Together on camera, the subjects and I craft a subtle narrative that leads us through the arid landscape of the desert, the complexities of friendship, and our weakening inner dialogues. They are on the constant hunt for food and supplies to sustain themselves, looting abandoned houses, and seeking refuge in the cool caves and riverbeds of the surrounding mountains. A drone operated by one of the characters acts as an eye-in-the-sky, a voice of reason, and a guardian angel for those that find themselves led astray. Their rambling, disembodied voiceovers become a musical chorus. Instagram and YouTube video interstitials inform the audience of the unique personalities of each character who takes on a persona true to themselves in their lives outside of the constructed narrative of this film and their social media accounts. Within their unique personas they all have developed their own unique ways to cope.

CRESTONE is my first feature film and the film that established me in the independent film world as a hybrid-doc filmmaker. I shot this film in 8 days with an extremely low budget of $5,000. The total budget of the film start to finish was under $25,000. These time and monetary ristrictions were a huge challenge but forced me to grow as a filmmaker under extreme conditions, making me the versitile and inventive artist that I am today. CRESTONE was not only a filmmaking experience for me, but an education. What I gleaned from my experience working in intimate situtuations with people that I care deeply about and relationships that I strive to foster and grow, set a precident for how my relationships with my cast and crew should be centered in my work moving forward. CRESTONE allowed me to explore my unique vision within longform film and gave me a platform to deepen my artistic exploration. This film truly opened the world of feature filmmaking for me and gave me the space to find myself as the filmmaker I am today. 

Official Screenings: 
Screenings/Festivals:
2020 TRUE/FALSE FILM FEST • Columbia, MO
2020 SXSW Film Festival Official Selection
2020 THE 4:3 ONLINE FILM FESTIVAL
2020 Maryland Film Festival
2020 Milwaukee Film Festival
2020 Beat Film Festival
2020 Champs Elysées Film Festival
2020 Denver Film Festival
2020 American Film Festival in Poland
2020 Sound Unseen 21
2020 Unerhört Music Film Festival
2020 The DocYard Online
2020 Bellweather Series
2021 CPH:DOX

(see resume for other screenings)

Selected press:
Bright Wall/Dark Room
Filmmaker Magazine
IonCinema
Bmore Art
Moveable Fest
Vox Magazine

Director/Writer - Marnie Ellen Hertzler
Original Score - Animal Collective
Cinematographer/Writer - Corey Hughes
Editor - Albert Birney
Producers - Riel Roch-Decter and Sebastian Pardo 

https://memory.is/crestone