Ojai Playhouse Film Festival

Film Trailer

Directed by Charlie Kaufman • 2025 • US, 27 mins

Starring Jessie Buckley, Josef Akiki, Eva H.D.

This impressionistic short film, from visionary director Charlie Kaufman, stars Jessie Buckley as a ghost roaming the streets of Athens in search of the city’s past and present.

Visionary director Charlie Kaufman reteams with actress Jessie Buckley for an impressionistic short film that exhumes spectral traces of personal and political history from the city of Athens. Buckley, in her second collaboration with Kaufman after 2020’s I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS, plays the ghost of a young woman captive to the elliptical memories of her life. She roams the streets of Athens as an unseen spectator, documenting the people of the city with a gold-plated instant film camera. Josef Akiki plays her compatriot in eternity — a former migrant, now a soul roving the liminal spaces between remembrance and absence. Haunting alongside them are the casualties of the Greek junta. Each block of pavement and stone echoes with lives lost, with history visible and invisible. Combining archival footage, street photography and narrative material shot on location by Michal Dymek (EO; THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE), the film’s ruminative reverie recalls the work of Chris Marker in how it melds person and place. Written by poet Eva H.D. and featuring an elegiac score from Ella van der Woude, HOW TO SHOOT A GHOST packs an extraordinary amount of talent and substance into its concise runtime.

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Urchin