We’re pleased to share the exclusive trailer premiere for Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye, which will be released virtually on October 23rd in 20+ theaters nationwide. An unorthodox teen coming-of-age movie with an increasingly sinister twist whose details are best left unspoiled, Taormina’s debut feature premiered at last year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival before making its international premiere at Locarno.

DP and co-producer Carson Lund wrote an essay for us last year about the film’s microbudget production, and specifically four lessons learned from the process of making Ham on Rye, which deployed over 100 cast members on a number of outdoor locations with no permits over 14 shooting days. From that piece:

Invest first in camera and lenses, but carefully consider the strategy. Seven or eight years ago, Shane Hurlbut might have told you DSLRs were the future of cinema and that there’s no reason why you, a poor filmmaker with no connections, shouldn’t be using them. Given rapid evolutions in image technology, however, such pronouncements haven’t aged well, and now DSLRs are not so much The Total Package as they are a very nifty solution for very specific projects with very particular looks. The reality is that they’re extremely limiting when it comes to really honing an aesthetic, whereas higher-end digital cameras like Red and Alexa enable exponential benefits for a difference in cost that is, with new private rental services like ShareGrid, considerably less than what it once was.

Factory 25 is distributing, and the film’s official website is here. The theaters playing the film include:

Bedford, NY: Bedford Playhouse

Buffalo, NY: North Park Theatre

New York, NY: Anthology Film Archive

Los Angeles, CA: Laemmle Theaters

Memphis, TN: Indie Memphis Theater

Minneapolis, MN: The Parkway Theater

New Orleans, LA: Zeitgeist Theater

Phoenix, AZ: FilmBar

Portland, ME: The Apohadion Theater

San Francisco, CA: Roxie Theatre

Seattle, WA: Grand Illusion

Seattle, WA: Scarecrow Video

Winston-Salem, NC: Aperture Cinemas