Gus Péwé - My Favorite Planet

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My Favorite Planet   2011

A surreal story of two estranged lovers, as one is left behind with only memories.

Written, Directed and Edited by Gus Péwé

Cinematography by Kylie Clark

Starring Ahtra Elnashar and Yaron Lotan.

Official Selection - 2012 Ann Arbor Film Festival

Official Selection - 2012 San Francisco Frozen Film Festival

This Vacuum is Too Loud   2012

The story of a man who finds himself lost on Earth, determined to return home.
Written, Directed, and Edited by Gus Péwé
Music by Tommy Colangelo
Starring Merlin Bell
with Lauren Adejumo, Sindy Ortiz Pimentel, Xavier Vargas, and Tierney Wiles
Winner of the Visions Film Festival and Conference 2013
Official Selection - New Orleans Film Festival 2012
Winner of the Hammer To Nail Short Film Contest: June 2012
Official Selection - The Wexner Center's 2012 Ohio Shorts Festival

(***Winner of the Hammer To Nail Short Film Contest: June 2012!*** Visit the official website of filmmaker Gus Péwé to learn—and watch—more.)
In my personal experience, just about every director I’ve spoken to or read about has pretty much always looked back on his or her earliest work with cringing and embarrassment. Even at their best, these early films tend to fall short of their marks. The reasons for this are multitudinous and obvious—the primary one being that making movies is actually a very difficult thing to do. But in many cases, the problem starts before production. It begins with the basic concept. So many young filmmakers are too busy copycatting other filmmakers to forge a path of their own. While that’s understandable, it doesn’t make this work any less painful to sit through.
But here comes Gus Péwé from Denison University with This Vacuum Is Too Loud. Though this endearing just-under-six-minute short film is far from perfect, it manages to accomplish something that should have Péwé’s instructors feeling very optimistic. Made while a freshman undergraduate, Péwé’s film is a super-duper example of a class assignment made on a tiny budget that has something many professionally produced films at more widely heralded film schools are often missing: a truly distinct voice. Péwé’s film is as far from a “calling card” as you could possibly encounter—thank God for that—and though that makes it easier to forgive its shortcomings, as the film builds to its stirring conclusion, those shortcomings no longer even feel like shortcomings.
This Vacuum Is Too Loud tells the story of a non-earthling who has been stuck on our planet with no ability to return home. Only this non-earthling doesn’t look like an alien. He looks like a regular old Denison University undergrad. You might be thinking that this was lazy writing/casting on Péwé’s part, but I ask you, would you rather this alien look more like an alien in the silvery sci-fi sense? Especially if it meant breaking out the tin foil from the kitchen cupboard? Fortunately, Péwé doesn’t try to reach beyond his limited production means with this early class assignment. Had he done that, he would have lost this viewer immediately.
Our tender alien hero does like some things about living on Earth—orange soda in a big Dixie cup and “the part of the year when the trees fall apart”—and he even found himself falling for a pretty girl, but when she paid more attention to a kid who had no decent values or respect for other people, he decided that he was officially over Earth. Now he just has to build a homing device that will enable him to travel back to the land where he belongs.
To us, that life might seem less than ideal. Yet for this alien, that is his home. He goes on to wax defensively poetic about how misguided it is for people to talk smack about outer space, about how empty and boring it must be. “Some planets are empty as the emptiest parts of space,” he says, as the camera drives past an unflattering—and seemingly unending—strip of suburban American sprawl. Right you are, shunned alien.
Though This Vacuum Is Too Loud is ultimately about loneliness, it’s about homesickness too. Incorporating animation into his otherwise scrappy digital video aesthetic, Péwé transcends his limited production means and delivers a strangely affecting conclusion. Moments after the credits have rolled, This Vacuum Is Too Loud remains there hovering like a weird planet in the nighttime sky.— Michael Tully

The Big West  2012

Territory and Hombre, two friends working together as bounty hunters, are out on the hunt for a tiny-hat-wearing psycho named Chicklets.
Written, Directed, and Edited by Gus Péwé.
Produced by Robert E. Hoxie
Starring Tommy Colangelo, Kyle Stacks, Trevor Cochran, and Chelsea Vandenburgh, with Cat Bailey, Sophia Rogers, and Travis Lockwood.

Same Ghost Every Night  2013

After moving into a new home, a young man deals with his feelings for an employee at the local grocery store. Meanwhile, he keeps seeing a bicycling bear, and meets a ghost that lives inside the food in his kitchen.
Starring Sawandi Johnson, Yamma Danfa, and Sophia Rogers.
Written, Directed, and Edited by Gus Péwé
Produced by Robert E. Hoxie
Official Selection - New Orleans Film Festival 2013
Featured on Directors Notes

Fight City: Shaolin Throwdown 2015

The Three Vivid Dreams  2010

Three friends share the vivid dreams they all had the previous night with one another. Discussions of lunar-cats, profound wrestling experiences and unattainable iced teas ensue, as well as Nietzsche quotes that don't appear in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Written, Directed, and Edited by Gus Péwé
Starring Gus Péwé, Kyle Stacks, Tommy Colangelo, and Carl Péwé.
Winner of Best Narrative at the 2010 Future of Cinema International Film Festival

Interview at the 2013 Visions Film Festival & Conference.

Featured on Jacksonopolis.com

Brent Green: Gus Péwé is something like a young Steve Buscemi or Richard Linklater. His films are impossibly charming and moving, and he makes them out in rural Michigan with a gaggle of incredibly talented friends. This is what middle America looks like. Things will get good again.