The Long Island International Film Expo Gives Local Filmmakers The Spotlight

Federico Castelluccio (left) and Paul Sorvino in a scene from Michael Ricigliano’s Lily of the Feast.

The New Guy

Michael Ricigliano started writing his first film, Lily of the Feast, in early 2009, after his Melville law firm, Margiotta & Ricigliano, merged with another Melville law firm, Lewis Johs Avallone Aviles. The move left him with a lot of free time on his hands, precious extra hours to dedicate to nothing but his wife and three kids.

“I was driving my wife crazy,” he says. “I was home in the winter and she said, ‘Really, you’re driving me crazy.’ So I said, ‘I think I’m going to write a screenplay.’”

Ricigliano had an idea for a story; he bought a book on screenwriting, read a few screenplays and got to work. He showed the script to one of his clients, who happened to work in the entertainment field, and the client introduced Ricigliano to visual artist/actor Federico Castelluccio (perhaps best known for his role as Furio Giunta on The Sopranos).

“I told [Castelluccio] the story and I said, ‘I’m looking to make a film.’” From there, says Ricigliano, Castelluccio read the screenplay “and said, ‘I love it, let’s do it.’ [Castelluccio] reached out and he got Paul Sorvino, Tony LoBianco, John Bianco from The Sopranos, Arthur Nascarella from The Sopranos…”

Given the resumes of those involved, it might come as no surprise that Lily of the Feast is a mob picture, set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1973. (Ricigliano chose Williamsburg as the setting for his film because his ancestors had settled there in the ’20s—although Ricigliano has spent his own life primarily on Long Island; he grew up in Garden City, and attended Hofstra University School of Law.) With Castelluccio serving as both the film’s star and its director, shooting began in the first week of May 2010, and post-production wrapped up a couple months later. Ricigliano mostly financed the project himself. The film features complicated characters and narrative turns, and Ricigliano writes the way a lawyer is trained to think: After writing the original draft, he says, he “re-works the script to address every possible inconsistency or counter argument” so he can “win [his] case, and the audience is the judge.”

Says Ricigliano, “I think the way you write a screenplay kind of lends itself more to the way that I like to write. It’s not like writing a novel. It’s a completely different animal. And I think that helps me, in terms of coming from a legal background, of writing briefs and writing motions, I can grasp the way that you have to write a screenplay.”

Though he was not trained to be a writer, he embraced the role with gusto. Along with Lily of the Feast, he has penned a script called Brooklyn Law, which was originally conceived as a feature film but reconfigured as a TV pilot, currently being shopped to networks. He also wrote a feature screenplay called Redemption and has four more scripts being developed for the coming year. Still, Ricigliano claims he’s slowed down his writing schedule.

“I haven’t been writing a lot lately,” he says. “I’m more focusing on getting these things moving as opposed to spending three or four hours writing.”

And the foremost of those projects is Lily of the Feast, which will screen at the LIIFE on Sunday, July 10, in the 7 p.m. film block. It is one of more than 90 short films to be featured at the festival—indeed, though 2011 is “the year of the documentary,” shorts make up a huge majority of the films screened at the LIIFE. Shorts are, of course, a staple of any film festival, but shorts are rarely the endgame of any filmmaker—they are introductions, jumping-off points, truncated as a matter of economic necesssity. And this is true for Ricigliano, and Lily of the Feast, too. It was written as a feature, and someday, Ricigliano hopes to see it developed and produced as one, too.

“We basically did the first 25 minutes of the film, [to see] if maybe from there we can get some interest to make the feature,” says Ricigliano. “It’s a short film, in and of itself, where it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but we really are hoping that we can make the entire feature.”

Ricigliano admits that—like so many other filmmakers—he’s hoping this festival can help to make that dream a reality.

“You’re looking to either get distributors interested in the film,” he says of the Expo, “or a production company to say, ‘We’d love to make it.’”

In this way, festivals like the LIIFE can act as the launching pad; they can give a filmmaker a career—or, at least, an audience for the evening.

“It really is a whole process,” he says, “and right now I’m just enjoying the ride of learning how to make it.”

The 2011 Long Island International Film Expo will be held from July 7–14, at Bellmore Movies, 222 Pettit Ave. in Bellmore. For more information and a complete schedule of screenings, go to www.LongIslandFilm.com.