Hooray for Hartfordwood? Hollyford? Hartford is becoming an East Coast filmmaking hub. The city has become a regular location for indie films, TV movies and shorts, as well as hosting production companies that produce industrial films and commercials. To drive home the fact that Hartford has a thriving local filmmaking scene, Real Art Ways is hosting an all-day Hartford Film Showcase on Feb. 1 from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The showcase features eight shorts, screened in two separate blocks in the morning and afternoon, then three feature-length films. Representatives of all the films will take part in panel discussions during the showcase.
The main organizer of the showcase is one of the filmmakers, screenwriter/director/producer TJ Noel-Sullivan, whose crime caper “Midas” is set at a Hartford insurance company and filmed some scenes at The Bushnell. He said the showcase is for “films that came out last year. It’s an impressive, diverse crop.”

Six of the shorts are screened in the first section of the showcase from 11 a.m. to noon. They include:
“Different Meaning,” directed by Jon Cruz
“I Chose Jesse,” directed by Derrick Christie
“Inmate,” directed by Enrique Lebron
“Nails in the Lamppost,” directed by Sarah Ghonaim
“Ride or Die,” directed by Connor Chute Marsley and
“SCARS,” directed by Madonna Lewis
There’s a panel of the shorts’ creators at noon, followed by a lunch roundtable where audience members can sit with and talk to the filmmakers.
Two “headline short films” will be screened together from 1:30 to 2:50 p.m. “Beige” was created by local comedian/actor/writer Rob Santos (who also happens to have a small role in “Midas”) based on his own life. It is directed by Edward Soto. “Ricky,” directed by Rashad Frett, is the exception to the “released last year” rule. It came out in 2023 but has now been expanded into a feature film that was filmed in the Hartford area earlier this year. The feature is having its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival at the same time that the Hartford showcase is happening, so the organizers are screening the short to honor that achievement.
The feature films begin screening at 3 p.m. starting with Noel-Sullivan’s “Midas,” about friends who uncover corruption at the insurance company where some of them work and orchestrate a theft to set things right.

“The Featherweight,” about Hartford-born prizefighter Willie Pep, directed by Robert Kolodny and starring James Madio, was filmed at multiple locations in the city. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and had a theatrical release in the U.S. last year. It screens from 4:45 to 6:30 p.m.
There’s a dinner roundtable, another chance for filmmakers and audience members to mingle, from 7 to 7:45 p.m. Noel-Sullivan said the panel discussions and roundtables will allow local filmmakers to be “in conversation with each other about making films in Hartford.”
The final screening of the showcase is a new documentary that has had only two previous public screenings anywhere. “The Whalers” chronicles the history of the celebrated Hartford-based NHL team that began in 1975 and left the city in 1997. The documentary, which marks the 50th anniversary of the Whalers’ founding, was produced by the team’s founder Howard Baldwin and directed by Pat Dickens.
The Hartford Film Showcase also sponsored a local screenwriting competition, soliciting scripts for short films that could be filmed in Hartford. The winners of the competition will be announced during the showcase.
Noel-Sullivan credited the Greater Hartford Arts Council with encouraging the showcase and supporting it with a grant. “Once they helped us get the grant, we asked Real Art Ways if we could hold it there and got an immediate yes.”
The showcase is a celebration of recent filmmaking achievements in the city, but Noel-Sullivan would like to dispel the impression that this is a fresh phenomenon. “There’s been a lot of films made here recently, so people are saying ‘I didn’t realize so much was going on. Is this new?’ But no — it was like this already. Those of us who are really plugged in know about all these films but now we want to share them.”
Thanks to the GHAC grant, the showcase will compensate the filmmakers with screening fees. Too often, Noel-Sullivan said, screenings like this are done without compensation.
Admission to the showcase is free, but registration is required and space is limited. Noel-Sullivan was encouraged to see that people who were attending because they knew one of the filmmakers and wanted to support that specific work were also signing up to see some of the other films.
Besides sharing their works, the participants in the first Hartford Film Showcase see the event as having “a larger role of continuing to support the local filmmaking community,” Noel-Sullivan said.
The Hartford Film Showcase takes place Feb. 1 from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford. Admission is free; registration is required at hartfordfilm.com. For more information, go to realartways.org.