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.

Rising juniors Luke Momo and Nevin Kelly-Fair, made the film as part of Campus MovieFest, a festival held at the Rose Hill campus in April. Participants were given six days to create a five-minute film, but Momo and Kelly-Fair went a step further, splitting The Last Playboys into two parts.

The movie follows the romantic and social misadventures of Kelly-Fair and fellow Fordham students Daniel Camou and David Moses over the course of a single evening, as they attempt to blend in at a fashion show. It will be screened Thursday, July 20 at the Princeton Public Library.

Momo, a philosophy and visual arts double major who also has a small role in the film, said the script was inspired by his and Kelly-Fair’s own interactions and friendships at Fordham.

“It all comes down to, ‘How do you approach other people? Are you on the surface or genuine?’ This is kind of a comic extrapolation of that,” he said.

A huge fan of film, Momo also founded the Fordham Filmmaking Club. He said he hopes viewers of The Last Playboys will note the diverse influences of both French director François Truffaut’s Les Mistons and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut in the film.

Part of the fun of making the film, he said, was trying to see how much could be done in an extremely short time frame, almost entirely with Fordham’s resources. The students edited the film on campus roughly 20 feet away from where the fashion show sequence was staged.

“It’s great to see just how much you can do with the space that you have,” he said.

For Kelly-Fair, a double major in philosophy and film and television, shooting three-quarters of the film in six hours proved to be “biting off more than we could chew.” But working with friends made it worth the effort.

“You can make fun stories on very, very small budgets, and people will want to see them and enjoy them. We thought it would be fun at the end of the year to make a big film with lots of friends,” he said.

“We’ve made smaller films before, with small groups of people, and we wanted to expand outward and see how well we could push ourselves.”

Another of Momo and Kelly-Fair’s films, a short dark comedy/thriller called Dead Dog
will also be screened this month, on July 22 at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival.