It’s an exciting time for filmmaking in Ulster County, from major productions on down to indie projects like Nimrod, a short film shot in Kingston last summer. The film, directed by Robert Gordon, is soon to be released.

Nimrod tells the story of a man who’s run out of options and turns to a hunter to help him take his own life. The two find themselves in an abandoned house, and these scenes were all shot on location in a suburban neighborhood of Kingston.

The homeowner, Mike Sweeney, is a Kingston resident and owner of a local hot dog truck.

“We found him on Craigslist,” Gordon said. “Great guy. The house was going to get torn down, so he let us doing pretty much whatever we wanted to it.”

Already, the house had no running water or electricity, with a bee infestation in one room, but Gordon had bigger plans.

“It wasn’t nearly derelict enough for our liking,” he said of the house.

Gordon and his crew got the go-ahead from Sweeney and went to town, spraying graffiti on the walls, and even planting a squirrel puppet in a few shots.

The house has since been bulldozed, but it lives on in Nimrod “all thanks to Mike,” Gordon said. “It couldn’t have been done without him.”

Gordon is a recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He made Nimrod through the school’s film program. The movie has been in the works since 2020, but when shooting was halted due to covid, Gordon and his writing partner Rachel Houseinger expanded the idea into a feature-length script.

The current 13-minute short film is an excerpt from that screenplay, shot in the summer of 2023.

Gordon is not a Hudson Valley native, but he knew about the area through his in-laws, and when he found Sweeney’s house, he knew Kingston was the perfect setting for Nimrod. The other locations in the movie were filmed in New York City, where Gordon is based.

Nimrod will get an official release this summer, and a trailer is available to watch now at nimrodfilm.com. Gordon plans to submit it to festivals and hopes to gain traction online via the film’s Instagram @nimrod_film.

Ulster County hopes to see more of this kind of filmmaking, alongside big-budget productions like Severance, especially as more film professionals choose to call our area home. The county is even considering creating a devoted film department or designated official.

Gordon, for one, is very enthusiastic about film prospects in Ulster County.

"It's pretty fantastic," he said. "Once everything pans out with Nimrod, I'd love to come back and shoot upstate again."