Joshua Kaufman
Multidisciplinary Artist Filmmaker

    
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Directing Reel
The End in Slow MotionShort Film13 min2025
Coming soon.
The End in Slow Motion (2025) is a thirteen-minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and a creative team, including frequent collaborator cinematographer Matthew Kyle Levine, with performances by Marcia DeBonis, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, and Diane Sykes.

A woman develops heightened awareness of the cruel world outside of an unnervingly calm house, as the threat of apocalypse stokes chaos.







Not Everything is FunnyShort Film9 min
2023
Not Everything Is Funny (2023) is a nine-minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and a creative team, including frequent collaborator cinematographer Matthew Kyle Levine, with performances by Angelo Aon, Ryan Boloix, Yen Wen Chen, Solange Coronel, Sifu Howsen, Marie Christine Katz, Nastasja Radovic, Carole Real, and Kailer Scopacasa.

Unsettlingly vulnerable, Not Everything is Funny is a montage of still photographs turning stale.

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The Car is OutsideShort Film9 min
2023
The Car Is Outside (2023) is a nine-minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and a creative team, including frequent collaborator cinematographer Matthew Kyle Levine, with performances by Gina Marie Holden and Nancy Kimball.

Two young women with a shared history are unable to keep their neuroses at bay as the textures of a car’s interior act as the only witnesses to a claustrophobic conversation.

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Things That Didn’t HappenShort Film12 min2023 Things That Didn’t Happen (2023) is a twelve-minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and a creative team, including frequent collaborator cinematographer Matthew Kyle Levine, with performances by Johnny Zito and Jamie MacDonald.

Years after a fateful car accident, a reculse remains uncomfortable in his skin and unable to shake off the feeling that a familiar stranger is watching him from just beyond the trees.

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Leadership ConferenceShort Film6 min 2022Leadership Conference (2022) is a six-minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and frequent collaborators, including cinematographer Matthew Kyle Levine, with performances by Michael Chinworth, Coral Maltz, and Zack Booth.

The film opens with a young man stumbling through the recollection of events leading to a traumatic head injury.

The second scene explores the panic-inducing kind of regret that swells from a loss of control.

Leadership Conference probes the subjective nature of experience - particularly of trauma - and the dissonance between our internal monologues and physical bodies.

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HoldShort Film16 min2021 Hold (2021) is a sixteen-minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and a creative team, including frequent collaborator cinematographer Matthew Kyle Levine, with performances by Jack Meriwether, Fernando Moya Delgado, and Megan Stratton.

In the wake of a poet’s confession-style solo performance, the poet and two friends spend their evening debriefing in a car, and perform the social dance of exposing and downplaying their feelings on topics ranging from the mundane to mental health and queer intimacy.

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Situations and CircumstancesShort Film25 min2021 Situations and Circumstances (2021) is a twenty-five minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and a team of creative collaborators, with performances by Lillian Bornstein, Carlo Fiorletta, Javan Nelson, Hannah Schmitt, Dexter Strong, and Michael Way.

By way of achingly intimate lens, the film monitors a diverse group of characters in an amateur improv class over the course of one night.

Their interactions, whether genuine or act, become all-encompassing in the small world they create: witnessing each others’ reactions, reading their thoughts, and engaging in the emotional labor of being human with other humans becomes magnified during the film’s unflinchingly personal probe.

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ReservationsShort Film3 min2021 Reservations (2021) is a three-minute film conceived by Joshua Kaufman and a team of creative collaborators, starring Silvana Jakich.

As she makes a series of phone calls from a hotel room, a woman seeks intimacy from unseen conversation partners, while indulging and straining against her solitide. 

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Backward PeopleTheater45 min2020 Backward People (2020) is an experimental theater performance that took place on February 5, 2020, conceived and facilitated by visual artist Joshua Kaufman and a team of creative collaborators, including an ensemble of performers.
 
Capturing themes from pulp horror, this experimental follow-up to 2019’s Unchilding carefully assembles a world of inner turmoil and dread through a “ceremony of absence,” repressed grief, and subtext.

Trading a grand concert hall for an intimate, pared-down rehearsal space, Backward People appeared as a one-night-only performance in February 2020 at Manhattan Theatre Club Studios.

The hour-long sold out performance was set to an ambient soundscape and featured virtually no set, instead utilizing the concept of body as action. Placed in immersive proximity, the audience experienced the performers posed as ephemeral statues occupying an uncanny space between stillness and suspension, displacement and embodiment. 

Program