Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sam Shainberg thought he’d become a historian, but that changed when he went to Bard College. “I found out that real historians study one topic their whole careers. I didn’t have patience for that; I wanted to learn a lot of stories and also to be out in the world as much as possible—to, I guess, have adventures.” At Bard, where his early work “veered a little bit more towards magical realism,” as well as documentary, teachers included the filmmakers Kelly Reichardt, Peggy Ahwesh and the late Peter Hutton, part of a program that was less about “technical education” and more about “ideological indoctrination.”

Extended travel through California and Mexico were part of a “fallow period — a painful post-graduate moment,” he says. After a stint on the road shooting interstitials for Fox Sports, Shainberg now works as a screenwriter and consultant, providing something akin to “personal training sessions” for other filmmakers on their scripts. An invitation from Josh and Benny Safdie to the pilot of the 2021 HBO reality series Chillin Island “brought me halfway out of the closet as an artist again and gave me a boost of confidence,” he says. He then wrote six short film scripts, “all about my hatred of rules,” intending them to form an anthology film like Wild Tales. Endless Sea, which played over 20 festivals and was winner of Best Narrative Short at the 2022 Santa Fe International Film Festival, is the first out of the gate, a wrenching, adrenalized work of neo-neorealism in which an aging flower delivery person goes on a small-scale urban odyssey to hustle the money needed for life-saving heart medication rendered suddenly unaffordable after a Medicare rules change.

Inspired by an incident Shainberg witnessed where a woman was stopped before fleeing a Flatbush pharmacy with unpaid-for meds, Endless Sea stars writer and comic Brenda Cullerton. The mother of a friend known for her incredible fashion sense—“The Queen of Greenwich Village,” Shainberg calls her—she brings an astonishing and unexpected (if you’ve seen her website) verisimilitude to the part. “Every day on set, she’d be like, ‘You’re making me look like shit!’” Shainberg remembers. “I would tell her, ‘There’s nothing better than looking like the character, then showing up to the premiere of the film looking the way you do.’”

Shainberg’s most recent short, the 2024 SXSW-premiering Shotplayer, about a legendary NYC pickpocket artist, was originally intended to pre-date Endless Sea, but the pandemic scrambled plans. “Pickpocketing is a dying art because we don’t carry cash anymore, men don’t wear suits and young kids are into glamorous or more technological crime now,” says Shainberg about the short’s elegiac vibe. It took the director months to track down its subject, Willfred Rose, then “days and days” of conversation to develop the concept. A week of scouting the subways in March 2020, just before lockdown, led to both Shainberg and his DP getting bad cases of COVID, after which the project went on hold. With financiers more interested in the Wild Tales anthology film concept, Endless Sea went up first when pandemic restrictions lifted.

When that film’s festival success led to a number of grants, Shainberg had the funds for a bigger version of the hybrid Shotplayer, in which the city’s subway system becomes an oneiric arena for Rose’s voiceover meditations on, yes, a dying criminal art but also existential issues around identity and family. (Sadly, Rose passed away before the film’s premiere.) “The movie improved tremendously, mainly because I’d been talking to Willfred once a month for two or three years,” says Shainberg, whose team shot without permits. “The city completely opened its arms to us. The cops didn’t care, and the bystanders loved it. We did wild stuff, like go into a subway car, cut the posters out of the frames for continuity and hang Astera tubes.” For the first shot, in which Rose’s face is revealed, “we had to black box the whole front of the train to kill the reflections.”

With Shotplayer on the festival circuit, winning awards at the Brooklyn and Tampere Film Festivals, Shainberg is at work on an expanded version of Endless Sea that “is more of a near future dystopia kind of film.” Then, there are many other projects, narratives and hybrids, set in northern Mali, eastern Indonesia and, of course, New York, that Shainberg hopes to do. “I’m basically only comfortable in New York or in the most far-flung places I can possibly think of,” Shainberg quips.—Scott Macaulay/Image: Daniel Zúñiga