'For George on His 30th Birthday,' Written, Directed and Featuring Music by Ursula Ellis '17 Now Available

For George on His 30th Birthday, written, directed & featuring music by alumna Ursula Ellis '17 is now available to view on Directors Notes and Film Shortage. The film's score is also available to download on Bandcamp. The film was an official selection for the 2018 Denver Film Festival, a Liberty Global Domestic Student Filmmaker Award nominee, and featured in the 2019 Lone Star Film Festival in Fort Worth, Texas. 

For George on His 30th Birthday takes place in the suburban South of the not-so-distant past, and follows a former MySpace-famous musician turned disgruntled pizza place employee, George, who spends a strange night with Deena, a sort-of ex-girlfriend and used-to-be fan. When they stay at a motel together, they realize that reconciling their relationship will not be as easy as it seems. 

Directors Notes writes, “Ellis’ short cleverly questions the balance of infatuation alongside factors of age and gender, twisting the atypical road movie formula that we’ve been seeing since Terrence Malick’s Badlands on its head. We’re delighted to premiere For George on His 30th Birthday on our pages today alongside a conversation with Ellis, who talks emotional history, creating a vintage, filmic look and the decade of her life it took to manifest this story.” 

In the full interview with Directors Notes, Ellis said of the film, “For George originated as a short story I wrote during college in Chicago. I had a fiction professor junior year who turned me onto Joan Didion, and I was having a real Slouching Towards Bethlehem moment stylistically. True to Deena’s experience in the film, I was also spending a lot of time in my hometown of Huntsville, Alabama during breaks from school, even though my parents had moved away by that point.” 

The film stars notable Broadway, television, and film actor Michael Esper, son of acting instructor William Esper and alumnus of Rutgers University. His credits include The Last Ship, A Man for All Seasons, and American Idiot on Broadway, and Nurse Jackie, The Good Wife, and Frances Ha for film and television. 

Ursula Ellis is an LA-based writer and director and alumna of Northwestern University and the Columbia University Film MFA Program. An Army daughter with Appalachian roots, she was born in Germany and grew up primarily in Alabama and Oklahoma. She is drawn to character-driven stories exploring intersectionality, agency, and memory—with a focus on regional settings and genre elements.

Ellis’s short films have screened at festivals like Fantasia, Denver, Woodstock, Indie Memphis, Mill Valley, Sarasota, and Cucalorus and featured online via Seed&Spark, NoBudge, Shudder, Directors Notes, Girls in Film, and Film Shortage. Her award-winning MFA thesis, Crick in the Holler, received an Alfred P. Sloan Production Grant.

Her feature and episodic scripts have placed in screenwriting fellowships and competitions including the Nicholls, CineStory, Scriptapalooza, Sundance Institute Labs, Tribeca/Sloan Filmmaker Fund (finalist), and received support from the CATWALK Institute and New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. Her pilot script, War is Kind, won the Lisa Rubin Award for Best Drama Teleplay and Faculty Selects at the 2019 Columbia University Film Festival of thesis and recent alumni work.