Pete Ohs
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Eight Feature Recommendations from ND/NF 2026, From an IFFR Winner to Charli XCX’s Indie Debut
New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase for emerging filmmakers co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, runs from April 8 to 19. Now in its 55th edition, ND/NF can boast of having screened the early films of generations of globally renowned directors, from Wim Wenders, Theo Angelopoulos, Steven Spielberg, James Benning, and Chantal Akerman in its first several years, to Yorgos Lanthimos, Laura Poitras, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, and RaMell Ross more recently. Most of the festival’s selections arrive by way of fests such as Berlin, Busan, Cannes, Sundance, Locarno and Venice, and as […]
by Nelson Kim on Apr 8, 2026 -
“You Pick Up Your Tools and Go Wherever the Wind Blows You”: Charli xcx and Pete Ohs on the Toronto-Premiering “Erupcja”
When Charli xcx walked into downtown New York bar Clandestino in May, 2024, she couldn’t have predicted that by the next day she would have committed to star in an independent film — especially one with no screenplay and scheduled to shoot just three months later, right before the start of her Brat tour. But that’s what happened when a chance encounter and free-flowing conversation led the pop star, actress and now writer and producer to say yes to the Toronto-premiering Erupcja, the latest “table of bubbles” film from Pete Ohs, a filmmaker who pursues both constant motion and a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 2, 2025 -
Open House: Callie Hernandez’s Berskhire Home and Temporary Film Studio
In 2023, Callie Hernandez turned her temporary home into a DIY movie studio. The actress, writer and producer had gone through major professional and personal upheaval when COVID upended her studio acting career and, shortly after, she lost her father. She kept working any way she could by collaborating on microbudget projects, such as Pete Ohs’s 2022 comedic ghost story Jethica, produced for less than $10,000 in a New Mexico Airbnb with just a handful of actors and Ohs taking on every behind-camera role himself. So, when a friend, dancer Brittany Bailey, asked whether Hernandez wanted to share an old […]
by Alex Lei on Jun 18, 2025 -
“It Was Always Fun, But Not Necessarily Easy”: DP Pete Ohs on OBEX
In OBEX, the secluded Conor finds his life take a turn for the worse when a state-of-the-art computer game begins to intrude into his reality. The film, directed by Albert Birney (The Strawberry Mansion), will premiere as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT section. Multi-hyphenate Pete Ohs was a co-writer as well as the director of photography for OBEX. He speaks in his capacity as cinematographer below, describing the goals and influences for the film’s look and explaining how his close friendship with Birney informed the film. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2025 -
“I Grew Up Playing Nintendo”: Albert Birney on OBEX
Albert Birney has been busy since 2020. On top of releasing 2022’s Eyeballs in the Darkness, a second feature in his series about a pair of 8-bit inspired animated best friends, Tux and Fanny, in, after releasing a video game incarnation of those characters the year before, and premiering his second collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, Birney has now completed his first live-action film as a solo director. OBEX started its humble, black-and-white production with resources Birney had on hand: his house, his bulldog-chihuahua-pug mix (what he calls a “Bullchug”) Dorothy and his affinity for the ‘80s technology of […]
by Alex Lei on Jan 25, 2025 -
“Foreign Aid for American Indies”: US in Progress 2024
Here’s a funny thing to think about: One of the best places to get a handle on what’s happening in American (and sometimes Canadian) independent film is a very long travel day away from New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, a millennium-old city with a historic Old Town. Adjacent is the very modern cineplex New Horizons, which shares its name with a sprawling summer festival and each November also hosts AFF and its industry-only sidebar, US in Progress. Described by one attendee as “foreign aid for American indies,” USIP has, over its […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 5, 2024 -
“I’m Constantly Creating Things and Questioning If the World Even Needs More Movies”: Pete Ohs on His Slamdance-Premiering Love and Work
Pete Ohs, a 2013 Filmmaker 25 New Face, describes his Slamdance-premiering comedy/drama Love and Work as “a film about an imaginary past as a way to figure out where we went wrong in the present.” A minimalist, slightly absurdist romantic comedy, the picture represents both a continuation of the pared-down production model Ohs described to Filmmaker upon the release of his previous Jethica as well as a dramatic departure. Instead of the Jethica‘s lo-fi naturalism, Ohs here goes for a clipped rhythms and a more deadpan affect as his two potential workmate lovers who meet in a shoe factory navigate […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: Pete Ohs’s Jethica
The trailer has dropped for director Pete Ohs’s microbudget horror film Jethica, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year. Ohs is also credited as the film’s cinematographer, editor and producer. Additionally, he co-wrote Jethica with cast members Callie Hernandez, Ashley Denise Robinson, Andy Faulkner and Will Madden. Acquired by Cinedigm today, the film will begin its theatrical run on January 13 at LA’s Lumiere Music Hall. Editor Scott Macaulay wrote of Jethica‘s premise in an interview we published with Ohs and the cast/co-writers out of SXSW: “Jethica is framed as a kind of post-coital campfire tale — Callie Hernandez’s Elena […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 8, 2022 -
Truly Micro: Pete Ohs and Tzvi Friedman on Their Ultra-Low-Budget Features, Jethica and Man
While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2022 -
Building a Microbudget Ghost Story Around an AirBnB Location: Director Pete Ohs and Cast on the SXSW-Premiering Jethica
Two women, each fleeing unspecified trauma, holed up in an aluminum-sided mobile home in the middle of a desolate patch of New Mexico flatlands is an apt set-up for a microbudget horror film, but the pleasures and originality of Pete Ohs SXSW-premiering Jethica are in the ways in which it avoids all the more obvious narrative pathways it might have taken. (Indeed, it’s an exemplar of George Saunders’s dictum of “ritual banality avoidance” — rejecting the “crappo version” of a story.) There are no screams or shaky-cam chases, no woman-in-jeopardy jump scares. Instead, Ohs has worked with his actors to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2022
