The girl stares down at the twentysomething in the hospital bed. Even from behind, she seems resigned, as if she knows in advance how this is all to resolve itself. As images blend reality and dream in Malik Hassan Sayeed’s She Walked Calmly Disappearing Into the Darkness, a journey between life and death, consciousness and memory wears out a path. It’s gravity-filled, poetic yet violent and jarring take on existence, how fragile it really is.

An awkward teen, black V-neck sweater and plaid skirt clad, sits isolated at one end of an audition room. On the other end is a conference table swamped with television executives, each of them debating the teen’s relative commercial appeal. “She worries me,” one says. “She’s a different direction. She’s real. Plus she looks like my cousin,” another counters. It’s a nightmare of sorts for a child actor, that horrible, lasting threat of potential rejection. Slyly funny and hugely warm-hearted, Chris Nelson’s Little Minx contribution short She Turns Back and Faces Forward At Peace parodies the culture of child stardom, addressing along the way issues of adolescent identity and independence.

In 1994 an entire generation of young black kids, misfits and alienated white kids all collectively and loudly fell in love one thing—hip-hop. While the grunge kids were weeping over Kurt Cobain’s happy pill, hand gun suicide, a death preferred over a life of lithium and manic depression, drug dealers in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn blasted Wu-Tang Clan's Return of the 36 Chambers; B-boys and B-girls plodded down the school hallways reciting A Tribe Called Quest's "What's the Scenario?"; potheads left random piles of cheap tobacco around campus after gutting out Phillie cigars to turn them into Phillie blunts. Vinyl junkies were sample fiends, ransacking their friends’ parents’ old record collections in search of the perfect beat. At high school dances kids did the Roger Rabbit. Ed Lover and Dr. Dre were like the corridors for would-be legendary rappers to catch fame from kicking it with the hosts of Yo MTV Raps.

Brett Jutkiewicz is one of the leaders of the new school. A fresh-faced 23-year-old bearing the seasoning and credits of someone years on, the Boston University graduate has played a role as producer, editor or cinematographer in work on screens both big (Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Azazel Jacob’s Momma’s Man) and small (Lena Dunham’s Web series Tight Shots). It was that first project which brought Jutkiewicz to the Sarasota Film Festival where he and I sat down for this conversation. An endearing film chronicling the exploits of a lovable kleptomaniac, The Pleasure of Being Robbed presents his feature film debut as a cinematographer.