Filmmaker Statement

Night Cafe is a film with a simple setup. A young waitress hits her head and proceeds to have a terrible night at her restaurant job, where she has to deal with a cast of unruly characters and is fatefully rewarded for her inequities. We've all had days that go from bad to worse, and Nicky, our protagonist, is a vehicle for this theme. This is what I wanted to explore in this short film, but I had to cover my tracks a bit, so we set the film in a familiar location and attempted to tell the story differently. From a visual perspective, Night Cafe was inspired by Van Gogh's painting "The Night Cafe." The warm light and red and green palette and the seedy setting dovetail perfectly with our themes of a fatefully bad day. Bad days feel cosmic, fatefully contrived. When many bad things align on the same day, it feels out of our control. So we wanted to create a world within Night Cafe where events felt like they unfolded naturally but the setting was controlled and cosmic.