Film festival by film festival, CCA alumnus and filmmaker Etienne Kallos (Film/Video 1997) is gaining renown on the international scene. His short films have screened at numerous festivals, including Cannes (2006), Berlin (2006), Sundance (2007), Telluride (2009), and Venice (2009). He frames much of his work around his unique perspective as a Greek from South Africa, as well as the exploration of sexuality and masculine identity.

Kallos's best-known film, Eersgeborene (2009), Afrikaans for "firstborn," was his thesis project for his master's degree in film directing at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. It went on to win a Corto Cortissimo Lion for best short film at the Venice Film Festival in 2009. Set in the Afrikaans minority culture of post-apartheid South Africa, Eersgeborene is a fable about incestuous brothers on a remote ostrich farm who descend into matricide and madness.

"I had made a previous short, doorman (2006), that did well at Cannes and Sundance in 2007. After that everyone was advising me to make a feature, but I didn't feel ready yet. So Eersgeborene is a middle step, a half-hour short fiction film to get me ready for my first feature," says Kallos.

"I had a dream one night in New York about driving to a strange, old farmhouse in South Africa. When I woke I decided Eersgeborene should take place on a farm, and that it should explore a conflicted relationship between two men in some sort of emotional power struggle. When I read African Gothic, an English translation of a play by my very first mentor, the internationally acclaimed Afrikaans playwright Reza de Wet, I realized how I could use part of it as a vehicle for my own preoccupations. This is how my film ended up being in Afrikaans, a language I don't speak well. Once I found the play and got Reza's permission, it took me just a month to write the 20-page script."

The process of making the film was far more difficult than Kallos expected. Despite his $20,000 budget and previous Cannes and Sundance credits, no one in South Africa was particularly interested in producing a short film. So, to his horror, he found himself doing all of his own producing, location scouting, production managing, and even script supervising! His connection to the prolific Reza de Wet opened many doors for him in the South African theater community, enabling him to secure several fantastic actors and other essential help for free.

"The shoot was two weeks in the desert with an extra three days of pick-ups a month later. Watching the raw footage after a shoot always sparks my imagination further and I find myself thinking about all the ways I could have written the story differently, or perhaps directed the actors differently. So then I think 'Why not?' and these extra scenes become my 'pick-ups.' I have never been able to make a film without doing pick-ups and some reshoots. It's part of the improvisational way I learned to work at CCA.

"My education at CCA was a great foundation. I learned to think outside the box, improvising and feeling things out as I go along, taking risks. These are essential to the creative process."

Kallos has received numerous awards and award nominations, including the Shorts Jury Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, a 2010 National Board of Review Student Grant Award, and a Charles & Lucille King Family Foundation Award. Additionally, Kallos was nominated for a Student Academy Award for his documentary Jane's Birthday Trip in 2006.

His short film doorman is available from Strand as part of the Boy's Life DVD series. Read more about it here at Logo.tv. Eersgeborene is still circulating at film festivals and not yet available on DVD. Kallos is currently traveling around South Africa, conducting interviews and collecting material for his next project, and soon he will return to New York to begin writing the script. Also in the fall he will start teaching film aesthetics in the graduate film program at New York University.