The 33rd Hamptons International Film Festival, which begins on Friday, Oct. 3, will include a years-in-the-making debut feature that is local, poignant, and inspired by real events.
"On the End," written and directed by Ari Selinger, depicts the tension between ordinary folk and the tidal-wave force of money, specifically the value affixed to "Hamptons" real estate. In the end, though, "On the End" is about love and, fitting for a tale set at "The End" -- a.k.a. Montauk -- endings.
In the bucolic setting of Navy Road on Montauk's Fort Pond Bay, Tom Ferreira was a mechanic who found himself the subject of an effort to remove him by way of a 2009 seizure of vehicles and equipment from his property. Neighbors' complaints and East Hampton Town's litter committee were the catalyst, then-town board members said. Code enforcement officers had asserted that the debris and combustible materials on the property could ignite.
Ferreira, who died in September 2024, held New York State and town licenses to operate an automotive repair business on his ramshackle property, in an area where zoning was upgraded from commercial-industrial to residential in 1983. Neighbors, however, had long complained that the numerous vehicles and assorted debris were both unsightly and posed a safety hazard. With the rezoning potentially prohibiting the continued operation of his business, he filed a $55 million civil rights action.
In 2016, the town board settled the lawsuit, its unanimous vote authorizing the town attorney's office to pay Ferreira $150,000 as well as half of a $20,000 lien imposed on the property. A town building inspector ultimately ruled that his business was a pre-existing, nonconforming use.
Amid the tumult of Ferreira's struggle to maintain his livelihood arrived Mr. Selinger, then a 20-year-old student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, who with his modest crew was scouting locations for "Deuce and a Quarter," his junior thesis film. "We traveled all around New York, finally ending up in Montauk," Mr. Selinger, whose parents own a house in Sag Harbor, remembered. "Everybody was turning us down. We drove down Navy Road, which I had never been on, and saw Tom, his head under the hood of a car. We rolled down the window, and my friend and production designer said, 'Hey, do you know a place we could shoot an auto repair shop?' "
An initial conversation, Mr. Selinger said, turned into an unlikely friendship, and Ferreira offered his backyard. "It does make sense as a mechanic's shop," he said, "but I figured we'd all need tetanus shots." The crew spent the next two months "taking Tom's spare plywood and picket fences, laying them down on the ground, and putting up plywood walls for a makeshift soundstage. It was rickety and dangerous, but it was really good."
"Deuce and a Quarter," in which viewers may also recognize the Clam Bar on Napeague, "launched the careers of a lot of people," Mr. Selinger said of his film school colleagues. "We were young, but it was a really massive effort, and even though not many people have seen the film, it put everybody on the map, and everybody loved Tom," who could be considered both eccentric and a compulsive hoarder.
Ferreira "would often say, 'You should make a documentary about my struggle with the town, they're trying to screw me,' " Mr. Selinger said. When The New York Times published an account of the dispute in 2016, "I started seeing, if I could get my head around the intricacies of East Hampton Town law, that maybe there's a story here."
Ultimately, another element of Ferreira's life came into focus -- his relationship with Catherine Tobin, or "Freckles," who lived with him for the last eight years of her life. Tobin died, days shy of her 48th birthday, in February 2017, and Mr. Selinger and Ferreira drew close again. During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, "I finally had time to really talk to Tom," he said. "We would call every day, and sometimes I'd visit him, even though he was never going to wear a mask."
Through the pain of revisiting the relationship with his late partner, Ferreira "gave me the hours' worth of information and situations and the ins and outs of what had happened," Mr. Selinger said. "I ended up with, like, 350 pages of what could have been a very legal mini-series, and over the course of Covid whittled it to what I thought was going to work as a movie." As the story took shape, Ferreira "became more a folk legend and a real character."
An initial effort to film in Belgium "fell apart," and production saw "a lot of heartbreaks," Mr. Selinger said, until serendipity intervened. Ferreira introduced him to a Montauk resident who knew someone who had just worked with the actor Tim Blake Nelson, whom Mr. Selinger had not considered for the lead role. "In my eyes, Tom is a big, bald guy with a mustache, and Tim is a very slight man with a full head of hair."
Nonetheless, he sent a script to the actor, who not only agreed but insisted on meeting his subject. "He stayed with Tom, which I thought was the most 'method' thing ever," Mr. Selinger said, recalling their first conference call as "a 'Through the Looking Glass' moment. It suddenly felt like, this is coming to life, I feel the wheels turning. The money started coming in, we started getting actors we thought would be good for Freckles." When Mireille Enos signed on for the role at the start of 2024, "we were off to the races."
In another stroke of good fortune, the town allowed the crew to film virtually on location, at a nearby, since-demolished Navy Road bungalow. "Those sunsets," Mr. Selinger said, trailing off. "We had to shoot it in Montauk." Filming from January to June, "it felt like walking on clouds," he said. "So many things fell into place. The production was a dream."
"Tom (Tim Blake Nelson) is a down on his luck Montauk mechanic," according to the festival's program guide, "who finds his fortune changing when he unexpectedly falls in love with Freckles (Mireille Enos), a fellow outcast. Their love is jeopardized when the Town of East Hampton conspires to forcibly remove Tom from his beachfront home and auto repair shop." "On the End," the guide says, "is a love story inspired by true events that evolves into a David vs. Goliath battle against greed and power in the rapidly changing East End."
Ferreira, Mr. Selinger said, was "someone who I'm pretty sure died, in the minds of a lot of people, as an offbeat weirdo. But when people see this, they're going to see him as a folk hero. Even folks who aren't necessarily like him will see themselves in him and in his story. The tragedy of it all," he said, "is that he's not here to see it."
"On the End" will be screened on Oct. 4 at 5:15 p.m. at the Sag Harbor Cinema -- "my childhood theater," Mr. Selinger noted -- and Oct. 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the East Hampton Cinema.
