On the silver screen: Critically acclaimed ‘Ghostlight’ screens in Greenport

The sense of community in the new film “Ghostlight,” which had a special screening and Q&A at North Fork Arts Center last week, aligns well with the fledgling theater in Greenport.

“The movie is about community,” co-director Alex Thompson says. “Any time there’s an arts organization that’s for everyone, it’s very exciting because I think that’s where you get community and that’s really what the movie’s about so it’s pretty cool to be here.”

Thompson and “Ghostlight” co-director and writer Kelly O’Sullivan attended the screening. The film, about a broken family that heals through community theater, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Jan. 18 and was released by IFC films and Sapan Studio June 14.

Thompson and O’Sullivan are a couple and have worked together in theater and various films, but hadn’t ever co-directed before. O’Sullivan began writing the screenplay during the pandemic.

“Directing can be very lonely, because you’re the one who’s being turned to again and again and you’re kind of by yourself trying to give out all these answers,” O’Sullivan says. “It’s really nice to know somebody has your back and you can always turn to that person.”

“Ghostlight” follows construction worker Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer), a man struggling with his troubled teenage daughter, Daisy (Kupferer’s real-life daughter, Katherine Mallen Kupferer) while mourning the loss of his son, Brian, who took his own life.

After an overwhelmed Dan has a physical altercation at work, intrigued bystander Rita (Dolly de Leon) recruits him to play the angry Lord Capulet for her community theater production of “Romeo and Juliet.” Dan ends up recruiting Daisy for the play, causing friction with his wife, Sharon (Kupferer’s partner, Tara Mallen), and through the project begins to properly grieve his son’s death.

“I was thinking about an unlikely hero and this guy who was a construction worker came to mind,” O’Sullivan says. “And then I had been thinking about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ because the National Theatre in London had put out a trailer for their production. Seeing that trailer … it was very emotional for me because all of the theaters were closed at the time. So, it just made me miss theater even more. It made me miss making something with my community. So the idea of an unlikely hero who is being forced to confront something in his personal life by doing a play that has something similar happen on stage, that’s where it came from.”

The cast, led by a real-life family, was a huge source of pride for the co-directors.

“I’m really proud of the performances, and I know that we can only take so much credit for that, but I’m really proud of the group that we assembled — both cast and crew,” O’Sullivan says. “I think we brought people on we knew that we could just trust to do their best and we let everybody sort of play on set.”

Filming wrapped after 26 days in Waukegan, Ill., on Oct. 31, 2023. Four days later, the filmmakers entered a cut of “Ghostlight” into the Sundance Film Festival and were accepted a week after submitting.

The director of Sundance Film Festival, Eugene Hernandez, was also in attendance at North Fork Arts Center Saturday, and was a part of a panel discussion after the film with O’Sullivan and Thompson moderated by Josh Sapan, who donated the Greenport Theatre to the nonprofit North Fork Arts Center in 2023 and is one of the films producers. 

“It’s everybody’s theater,” Sapan said while introducing the film and thanking the community for their donations, which helped officially open the arts center last month.

Hernandez said during the panel discussion that Sundance had 17,400 submissions and selected 90 features and five short films.

“There’s a whole other story about how late this one came in for a lot of different reasons,” Hernandez said. “We were effectively done with our selection process when we got this movie, but because of these filmmakers’ track record and the promise of the film, what it was about, we watched it late in the process and invited it. It gives me hope when we can see and bring a film as beautiful as this to a festival like Sundance, and then to have it here in Greenport — at a community that has just come together to rebuild this and relaunch this theater just this past year — that gives me a lot of hope.”

Starting in September, Thompson and O’Sullivan will be shooting a new film in Arkansas called “Mouse.” The film, set in the early 2000s, is about two high school best friends and how they maneuver their relationship when an unexpected event upsets their dynamic.

Tickets for “Ghostlight” are on sale at northfork-artscenter.org. The film will be showing at the theater for the week.