Winning short film “Scattered” makes it from New Jersey to Cannes

In just 48 hours, writer/producer Guy Olivieri, along with director/editor/producer Neil Fennell and a team of filmmaking friends, created the short film Scattered, which ultimately brought them to the Cannes International Film Festival.

Scattered, the story of how a grown gay man deals with the ashes of his estranged father, won the New York 48 Hour Film Project. As one of the Project’s top 12 films in the world, Scattered was screened during Cannes at the Short Film Corner, an invitation-only program for award-winning short films, in the Marché du Film.

The 48 Hour Film Project is a competition that takes place in over 150 cities worldwide. Teams are tasked with creating a film from scratch within one weekend. To ensure that no one breaks the rules, they are given assignments on Friday (such as a character name and a genre of film), which must appear in the completed film on Sunday.

For Scattered, the team was tasked with creating a road picture. Much of the short was filmed and set in New Jersey, where Guy Olivieri grew up and where his parents and some of the cast still live.

“The film is a queer film! I wrote it and played the lead,” said Olivieri. “It’s about a gay man who has to find a way to scatter the ashes of his father, who rejected him for being gay.  It’s really a story about chosen family. And, though it sounds unlikely, it’s actually a comedy.”

Because he and his filmmaker friends prefer to pursue creative productivity rather than simply socializing, the 48 Hour Film Project provides them with the opportunity to get together every year with a specific purpose: make a film within 48 hours! “Some people want to hang out and do nothing, but we’re all artists, so we like to hang out and make something,” Olivieri explained. “So, we talk about what’s happening in our lives, and we have a great weekend writing something that’s reflective of where we are in our lives. Not everybody on the crew is a queer person, but we try to move in that direction whenever possible, and this year it worked out for us.”

He and his friends get together in New York each year to participate in the project, and while the film Scattered is based in New York, much of it takes place in New Jersey. When Olivieri’s character Patrick and his crew, helping him scatter his father’s ashes, decide to go to Patrick’s father’s house in New Jersey, they go to the house of one of the cast members in Ridgewood.

As a child, Olivieri spent his early years in Weehawken, where his father was the high school principal for 40 years. He then moved to Cresskill, where he attended high school and stayed into his mid-20s. Co-star Rob Maitner is from Saddle Brook. There’s even a well-known actor from New Jersey who makes a cameo as the protagonist’s brother at the end of Scattered: David Krumholtz, who was in Oppenheimer. “He’s friends with one of our producers, and this is the second film of ours he’s been in,” said Olivieri.

Just as the New Jersey setting in Scattered is subtle, so is its gay theme. It’s not until about a minute and a half into the seven-and-a-half-minute film that the viewer is even sure Olivieri’s character Patrick, is gay when he says, “ … and I said, ‘Don’t talk to my boyfriend that way.’ And that was it. That was the last conversation we had.”

Olivieri explains the reason for his subtlety about being gay in this and other films he’s worked on: “We want to show movies where the gayness is not the plot, just gay people doing things that they’re doing. It does change the way everything happens, but there’s just not a lot of stories about middle-aged people who are gay doing things that are not about identity. That’s the sweet spot for the stuff we like to make”

the film is ultimately about one’s chosen family.

He cites Daniel Craig’s character in Knives Out as an example: “He’s a detective, and he’s just gay. It’s important, but it’s not what the story is about. It’s rare to see a grown-up character who is gay and it’s not a problem. It’s kind of groundbreaking when you think about it; it just doesn’t happen very often.”

While the protagonist in Scattered is also gay, the film is ultimately about one’s chosen family. “We think of the movie as a celebration of friendship,” said Olivieri. “As we get older, especially queer people, sometimes it’s more about chosen family than real family. You sometimes don’t notice the people showing up for you when you don’t even know you need them to show up for you.”

Not only did Scattered win Best Film in the 2024 New York 48 Hour Film Project, but Olivieri also won Best Actor, and the cast won Best Ensemble.

Attending the Cannes Film Festival was an experience unto itself, about which Olivieri shared some of his more interesting adventures in a recent blog post. “One of my goals for this trip was to get beautiful red carpet pictures, but you really don’t have access to the big red carpet unless you go to one of the giant screenings at The Palais. I couldn’t get tickets for those. So, how was I going to get those pictures? We got into black tie early on Tuesday morning and stood in the standby queue for the 8:15 am film at The Palais. Because of the time, it was pretty empty, and we got in! But instead of finding seats inside, we took about 300 pictures on the red carpet until a very stern French usher kicked us out.

We pretended to go into the movie and then wandered around the Palais, giggling and looking for an inconspicuous exit. In the queue, we’d met a cinematographer from Finland, who generously took pictures for us. Unsurprisingly, they were excellent pictures.”

“Each year, my friends and I drop everything for one weekend to laugh, cry, and try to create something amazing.”

Scattered was Olivieri’s and his team’s seventh 48 Hour Film Project film. They’d won New York four times, but this was their first time getting to Cannes. “Getting to share this pinnacle of my career with my filmmaking friends was unforgettable,” Olivieri said in a blog post. “Neil, Reed [C. Campbell], Brianne [Higgins], Duane [C. Ferguson], Rob [Maitner], David [Budway], Tricia [Leid], and the rest of the crew that couldn’t make it to France, I’m so proud of you (and me), and making movies with you is the biggest joy of my career!”  

He added, “Each year, my friends and I drop everything for one weekend to laugh, cry, and try to create something amazing. Even when we don’t win, it’s always my favorite weekend of the year. And to ride this special film all the way to the top … this experience is something I will look back on with pride when I’m 90. What a ride!”

Olivieri is a veteran actor, writer, and producer, who has appeared on stage in the National Tour of Rent as Mark. On television, he’s been on Homeland, Blue Bloods, The Blacklist, and Gossip Girl, to name a few. As a writer, he’s created nine short films and two TV pilots that have been screened on six continents.

Scattered is not the only LGBTQ-themed film Olivieri has made with Fennell as director and Maitner as his co-star. Their gay romance I Don’t Believe in That has reached more than 150,000 views on YouTube. You can see all of his work with Giant Cookie Films here: youtube.com/@giantcookieprod.