An award-winning filmmaker blends horror and sci-fi

When it was time to apply to college, Luke Momo took one tip in particular to heart: Don’t major in film. A close, older friend suggested he pick one of the humanities—English, history, philosophy—and instead explore the ways a particular subject intersects with film.

Now, with an award-winning debut feature under his belt and a trove of ideas to pursue, Momo has been reflecting on his time at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in philosophy, dove into filmmaking as a visual arts minor, and forged connections that proved invaluable when it came time to cast his movie, Capsules. 

A Princeton, New Jersey, native, Momo was drawn across the river to the University for its “intellectual rigor,” originally choosing to major in classics. He did veer from his friend’s advice a bit by minoring in visual arts with a concentration in film. But a philosophical ethics class he took with professor Janna van Grunsven, Ph.D., during his sophomore year made him reconsider. 

“After I took that class, I realized that [it was]what I’d want to do my major in [and explore]the intersection between philosophy and film,” he says. The professor “was able to share with me a higher level of some of the things I was interested in at that time—and I still am. She was very supportive in that way.”

Creating a Cinema Community on Campus

Outside of class, Momo founded Fordham’s Filmmaking Club in 2016, a kind of film study group for students interested in viewing and discussing movies, as well as pursuing projects together.

“We could help each other make our films and collaborate,” he says. “We’d have very memorable screenings of all kinds of different movies that you otherwise wouldn’t see, and you could watch them in a group and discuss them afterward.”

The club continues today, with students collaborating on film projects, sharing them, and hosting film festivals. “It seems to be fulfilling its original purpose and also growing—becoming more and encompassing more ideas and progressing,” Momo says.

He also completed two internships, one at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative—an artist-run nonprofit—and one at Le Cinéma Club, a curated streaming platform featuring one free film each week. 

“It was just really cool because week after week, we were researching, writing about, discovering, and highlighting works of film art,” he says, including a number of international films to which he wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed. 

From Campus Collaboration to Award-Winning Feature

Capsules, which Momo wrote with Davis Browne, FCLC ’19, features more than half a dozen Fordham graduates in starring and behind-the-scenes roles. 

The film blends sci-fi and horror, focusing on four chemistry students who experiment with mysterious substances and find themselves struggling with addiction in an unexpected way: They’ll die unless they take more.

“I just basically pursued an emotional feeling … the fear of letting one’s life slip away and a sadness over mistakes,” says Momo, who directed the film. The premise came after the pandemic, when “we had been through so many traumas personally, in our communities, and on a global level. All these things came together, and the idea for Capsules just sort of emerged.”

The film earned the Best Feature award at the 2022 Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York City. Momo later sold the film to a distributor, and it’s available to watch on Tubi and Vudu.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

On July 30, the answer came from space: a call for human unity during a time of bitter conflicts, articulated by someone who is—quite literally—above it all.

“We watch the news up here every night, and we’re aware of what is going on in the world,” said Ricky Arnold, a NASA flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, speaking via live webcast. He cited the crew’s cooperative efforts as an example of what can happen when people from diverse nations work together.

Haig and her fellow interns watched from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

“It was really exciting,” said Haig, who is getting ready for the fall quarter at Stanford, where she will pursue a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics.

The experience, part of a NASA educational program, fueled her enthusiasm for becoming an aerospace engineer and, hopefully, an astronaut herself one day. It also provided a thrilling coda to an undergraduate career that was heavy on science and grant-funded scientific research but also on classic humanistic aspects of Jesuit education.

Science Studies Inflected with Jesuit Values

Haig graduated summa cum laude from Fordham in May with a double major: engineering physics, with a concentration in mechanical engineering, and classical civilization. At NASA in Cleveland, she spent the summer in the ARETEP (Aeronautics Research and Engineering Team) program, studying the movement of urban air masses with an eye toward safety standards for new aerial vehicles that could one day be zipping around city skies.

Aviation is a longtime interest. In high school, she volunteered at an aviation museum near her Long Island home and enjoyed working with the museum’s elderly docents—an experience that led her to volunteer at Fordham as an aide to a former missionary—Richard Hoar, S.J.—living in the Murray-Weigel Hall retirement residence on the Rose Hill campus. “He actually has a master’s degree in physics, so it was a great fit,” Haig said.

A student in the honors program, she loved the program’s classics-related courses and kept signing up for more of them—Roman art, Latin, Greek. “Before I knew it, I had a major,” she said. For her senior thesis, she melded her two majors by examining how the Romans, known as great engineers, might have managed to fill the Colosseum with water for mock naval battles, as some have suggested they did.

There’s little evidence this happened. However, “the drains underneath the Colosseum are a lot larger than they would need to be just for rain water and waste water,” Haig said.

She also pursued varied scientific research projects. During the summer between sophomore and junior years, a Fordham Undergraduate Research Grant made it possible for her to work with physics professor Stephen Holler, Ph.D., on developing a new optical-fiber probe for use in analyzing tumors. For her second undergraduate research project, she worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago between junior and senior year and diagnosed a malfunction in the accelerator’s monitoring components.

She traveled to present her research at academic conclaves on the West Coast, thanks to travel grants provided by the University, and recently was awarded the Fordham College Alumni Association’s Undergraduate Research Symposium grant.

Haig suspects that her research helped her attain the NASA internship, a long-sought prize.

“I’ve been applying for the NASA program for a while, for at least a couple of summers, and I guess this summer I finally had enough research experience,” she said.

She found the internship to be a cornucopia for the scientifically curious. In addition to getting intensive introductions to aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics, Haig has found scientists and engineers readily responsive to her email queries.

“I’ve found everybody to be so helpful and so willing to talk about their projects,” she said. “There are people working on missions that are going to Mars, stuff that’s going into deep space eventually. People say, ‘Yeah, come on over.’ I’ve been able to make so many connections.”

Aiming a Question at the Heavens

When she was chosen to record a question for the space station’s astronauts, she moved away from the technical and leaned toward the liberal arts, asking a question with a philosophical bent: “In today’s world, what is the most compelling reason to engage in human spaceflight?”

In his answer, Ricky Arnold, the NASA flight engineer, cited the scientific research conducted in space, as well as the crew’s perspective—“a higher plane of agreement”—on all the strife occurring far below.

“We have two Russians, three Americans, and a German right now,” he said, bobbing up and down in the zero gravity and casually moving his hands away from the microphone floating in front of him. “We have found something we all believe in, and the operations both here and on the ground are seamless because we all believe in the same thing. …

“There’s a really powerful message to all humans about what we as a species … are capable of when we put aside differences and focus on higher objectives as a species.”

Watch NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold’s webcast below. Bernadette Haig poses her question at the 5:22 mark. 

“They have a beautiful back yard, and they loved doing their own landscaping,” she said. “I’d always ask them what kinds of trees they were putting in so I learned the different types–like the Purple Leaf Plum, Sugar Leaf Maple, and Blue Spruce. I learned a lot.”

Last October, Brunetti entered a tree-naming competition sponsored by the Departments of Biology and Classics to name as many trees on the Rose Hill campus as possible using their Latin names—good practice for the biology major because, she said, Latin is important in taxonomy and the naming of new species.

So while she walked to classes on campus, she took photos of trees she recognized and then looked up the Latin names, which she said correspond to a unique naming system.

“A lot of the plants are named after the people that discover them or for their characteristics— like there was one plant that used nasum, which is the [Latin]  word for nose, because the leaves looked like a nose,” she said.

Brunetti won the contest by correctly naming 10 campus species of trees. She said her favorite tree is near Martyrs’ Court, a Red Maple (pictured to the right.)

“It’s Acer Rubrum,” she said. “It’s very bright and vibrant. A crimson color. It really stands out.”

Brunetti said she hopes other students and members of the Fordham community take the time to stop and notice the trees–especially on Arbor Day, April 28.

“Part of the reason I love Fordham is because of the beautiful landscaping on campus,” she said. “It’s like being at home in nature.”

Keep up on campus happenings
Subscribe to Fordham News

Related article: Happy Homer Halloween!

In a bit of a mashup, the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Classics celebrated Halloween, Homeric classics, and Rose Hill’s extraordinary collection of trees at a party held on Oct. 28.

Organizers challenged students from all disciplines to name as many Rose Hill trees by both their common name and their Latin name. The contest winner was announced at a Halloween party where guests dressed up as their favorite Homeric characters.

One common denominator for everyone attending, including biologists, classics majors, anthropologists, and more, was an appreciation for Latin. Anthropology major John Perroni said that he likes to attend as many events thrown by the Classics Club in order to brush up on the language—he encounters Latin through forensics and biological anthropology, which use plenty of Latin derivatives.

“I feel like if I know the Latin and I come to a term that I’m unfamiliar with, I’ll be able to figure out what it means,” he said.

For sophomore Blair Brunetti, winner of the tree-naming competition, Latin is big part of her biology curriculum. She said that while attending a Classics Club event at the herbarium at nearby New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), she began to understand how plants were named.

“A lot of the plants are named after the people that discover them or for their characteristics, like there was one plant that used nasum, which is the [Latin] word for nose, because the leaves looked like a nose,” she said.

The tree contest turned out to be a two way street, as many of the Latin majors found an appreciation for botany. Classics graduate student Harrison Troyano said he recently presented a paper on the flora and fauna found in Seneca’s Oedipus.

“I see that my interest is not just something for a paper, but that it might be more useful in the future,” he said. Fordham’s strong biology department, as well as its proximity to NYBG make for “more opportunities that I have here at Fordham—and that makes botany more enticing.”

Just as Troyano was speaking of Oedipus, a reference to the play arrived in the form of Devin D’agostino, dressed as a dinosaur in a toga: Oedipus Tyrannosaurus Rex.