Personal themes underlie local filmmaker’s sci-fi film
Joe Gietl’s movie “A Void” came after addiction struggle
On the surface, the short feature “A Void,” which premieres this weekend at the Madison Theatre in Albany, appears to be a sciencefiction story about the laboratory creation of a bubble of pure emptiness.
“But for 32-year-old filmmaker and Colonie native Joe Gietl, the concept is a metaphor for something much deeper.”
Gietl will mark 11 years of sobriety later this month, knows something about feeling surrounded by emptiness. “Growing up, I was that class clown type of guy,” he said. “I wanted that validation … people thinking I was funny, or liking me. I think there was a sadness, even from a young age.”
As happens for many creatives, Gietl’s desire for a future career as an artist ran up against the usual admonitions — being told that those kinds of dreams come true only for
“one in a million,” for instance.
Yet the desire for attention persisted, creating internal turmoil that he eventually tried to resolve through drug use. When he was using, “it felt like I could be myself,” he explained. “All that performative stuff that I was doing my whole life for attention or for love … it was answering those questions.”
But he was not in any sense what he calls a “functional drug He dropped out of college, struggled to keep jobs and found himself on a rapid descent into a void of his own. “I got to the point where I thought I didn’t care if I lived or died, and that happened within the course of a year,” he recounted. At his lowest point, sick and teetering on the edge of death, he made a call for help to someone he describes as being extremely supportive throughout his life: his mom, Paula Conklin. “Thank God she answered the phone,” he added.
He would subsequently spend multiple days in an inuser”:
tensive care unit, and it was during that time that, as he explains it, “Something clicked in me.” In rehab, he found a passion for writing about his experience — first in the form of lyrics, later as stories and eventually as film scripts. “I clung to that like a life raft,” he said. As he began to find his voice, he also developed a healthy perspective on success — one that included an acceptance of small failures along the way as necessary and inevitable.
That’s how he frames his attempt at launching himself in
Los Angeles, where he moved after getting just 10 months of sobriety under his belt. “I had no idea who I was. It was this lonely feeling of ‘I’m in this amazing place now; I’m here but I'm not a part of it,’” he said. He returned home around a year later, just in time to attend the funeral of his beloved grandfather Sam Papa. Though the L.A. venture felt like a failure, he said, “going out there helped me figure out who I was again.”
Today, as is common for people in recovery, Gietl shares what he’s figured out with others just getting sober. And although the new film doesn’t draw directly from those experiences, he said, “It can’t help but be a theme in anything I do.”
"A Void" is Gietl's second film after “Museum,” which screened at the Adirondack Film Festival in 2019, and grief is a major theme. One of the main characters, played by actress Kristin Noriega, processes hers by devoting her energies toward finding a breakthrough in the lab; her husband, played by Mu-shaka Benson, seeks refuge in memories instead. Gietl can relate to the choices of both characters. “It’s almost like I was transferring my own feelings of emptiness into something meaningful,” he explained.
Finding his path drew upon inspiration from other films — among them a documentary about Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “One More Time with Feeling,” which looks at Cave’s experience of losing his teenage son during the recording of a new album. “He likened grief to being attached to a rubber band, and no matter how far away you get ... you keep snapping back to it,” Gietl recalled, adding that seeing that film freed him to create his own narrative in a fragmented, nonlinear way, with his characters compelled to return repeatedly to the event at the center of their grief.
He also drew upon support from The APB, a Troy-based film production collective that connected him with experienced creatives and served as an incubator for his vision. According to Gietl, the opportunity to work with people like commercial producer John W. Yost, production designer John Stegemann, cinematographer Jim Powers and visual effects designer Lawrence Basso, made up for his lack of professional training. “I didn’t go to film school,” he explained. “I just made a movie.”
Further networking led him to find Beth Hinde, a writer-producer based in Des Moines, Iowa, who became a primary investor in the film. He put his own money into the project, and his family supported him as well; his mom is listed as one of the film’s producers. Gietl also named his production company Stickboat Films as a way of honoring a cherished childhood memory that he recalls as his first foray into imagination: He and his grandfather would select sticks to launch in a backyard creek, pretending they were competing in a boat race. “That's almost what a film is to me,” he said.
“It’s like building a boat made of sticks. It’s like this rickety thing, and it feels like it could fall apart, but it doesn’t. You build a strong foundation with a good script and bring a talented crew on board to make sure it doesn’t [sink] when the current takes it away.”
As he neared the end of the filmmaking process — a journey of roughly four years since he started developing his initial concepts for the story — Gietl began to feel he was finding his stride as a director. “I had the plates spinning, all at the same time. I had that balance,” explained. And he knew this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Following the premiere, his plan for “A Void” is to submit to festivals, although he acknowledged that the film’s length might create challenges: At 45 minutes, the piece may be too long to be considered a short, while at the same time too short to be considered a feature. Yet he feels he has been successful in being true to the story he wanted to tell, so the film is exactly the length it needs to be.
That commitment to truth is paramount for Gietl, who says that his work isn’t done until finds it. “You know it when you feel it, and when you write it,” he said. “It's like this little nugget of gold.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that a recurring theme in the 12-step programs commonly followed by people in recovery is the importance of honesty with oneself. “What I’m really trying to do is ... understand the world, and find truth and humanity in these characters,” Gietl said. “And ultimately, myself.”
▶ To learn more about “A Void,” visit facebook.com/avoidmovie or follow on Instagram, @a_voidfilm. A trailer for the film is available on Vimeo.