From Matt Damon and Casey Affleck’s recent North End appearance at Bova’s to film The Instigators, to Ben Affleck’s Dunkin commercial, you could say Boston is turning into somewhat of a mini-Hollywood. While we know many successful actors like Damon, Wahlberg, Uzo Aduba, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, and Chris Evans got their start here at local theaters and from introductory auditions, so did many Oscar-winning movie makers such as the most recent best motion picture-winning duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once- Emerson grads Daniel Kwan (and Westboro, MA native) and Daniel Scheinert.
We’ve now seen a new flood of outstanding emerging talent from the past few weeks of movie festivals from BUFF, the Boston Underground Film Festival to the more recent Boston International Film Festival. These are the 3 directors who captivated us and lured us into their incredible storylines!
Hussein Hammouda
Hammouda, of Knives Out and Don’t Look Up is forging a genre of his own with his most recent feature film, Us and Ourselves. The feel-good rom-com is set in the Massachusetts Berkshires and follows Sebastian, a writer caught at a fork in the road and forced to question his past college love, current partner and his third rollercoaster passion-writing. You’ll be swept away into the cozy Massachusetts storyline and feel as if you’re part of the group as these old college friends reunite for a weekend at a scenic lake house in the fall.
Hammouda’s premiere feature from production company Earthling Pictures, Dominoes, equally paved a unique and never-before-seen category for itself. The narrative tied together a series of vignettes which pieced together a movie within a movie, keeping us on the edge of our seats the entire time!
Forest Quaglia
Inspired by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s success with Good Will Hunting at such a young age, Quaglia launched his own production company, Forest Quaglia Studios, to focus on writing and producing movies for himself to star in amid the pandemic chaos of 2020. After producing and starring in a series of award-winning short films, Quaglia is now completing his first feature. An epic survival adventure film titled, Stranded.
Robert Curreri
Hailing from Beverly, Massachusetts, Curreri is recent Emerson graduate whose newest film, Cadillac: A Mobster Fairy Tale debuted at Boston’s 2023 International Film Festival. Filmed and set entirely in Boston’s North End, the film follows a young soldier from Boston’s mafia after the love of his life leaves him in the dust. He must decide what his future will look like without her.
Making this film was a full-circle moment for Curreri who grew up visiting his grandmother that lived in the North End. Several of the nooks and alleyways in the film he frequented as a child on those nostalgic family visits.
Daniel Groom
Daniel Groom is a Boston-based director and alumni of New England Institute of Art. Stonegate, Groom’s new Drama/Horror follows “four teenage urban explorers who break into an abandoned Massachusetts mental hospital. The uncover videotape which shows the murder of a patient by one of the doctors sever years ago. This discovery also leads to a revelation of a much darker secret amongst the group of friends,” notes Groom. Stonegate was the first project to film at Tewksbury State Hospital since HBO’s multiverse Stephen King-inspired series, Castle Rock.
Groom is also the founder of his own production company, ParaAct Entertainment, whose productions won two awards at the 2020 Lonely Seal Music & Film Festival.