By Sophia A. Niarchos
OYSTER BAY, N.Y. — Rhodes-born Nectarios Leonidas was more greatly influenced in his career choice by his fifth grade teacher in a Connecticut public school than he was by his economics professors at the University of Connecticut.
“When I first moved to the U.S. in 1977, my 5th grade teacher took us to the movies every Saturday. I remember seeing Buck Rogers, Get Smart, and other kids films and going home and reliving them in my mind. I’d think about how things were done; but at the time, I didn’t know I could make a career out of it. The older I got, the more I was interested in how movies were made.”

After completing his B.A. in Economics, Nectarios realized he wanted to learn more about movie making and selected New York City’s School of Visual Arts largely because he wanted to stay in New England where the focus was more on the independent films he preferred over the mainstream films made in L.A.

Nectarios got his first break in 1996 as a student when he was given the opportunity to work on pre-production location negotiations for the Miramax film Basquiat, about a 19-year-old graffiti writer who became one of the most successful, though controversial, artists in the world.

“It was during this on-location work that I first realized moviemaking was a viable option for a career, that being a filmmaker wasn’t out of my reach,” he said.

Leonidas even benefited from a short-term stint on the location crew of Barbara Streisand’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces” (“she fired the whole department, as well as an excellent director of photography”). His early filmmaking experience had been limited to the “guerrilla” type, requiring stealthy forages into public places with a small crew and a video camera, but with “The Mirror,” which was filmed at Columbia University and at an armory in Harlem, he saw moviemaking being done on big stages.

Leonidas set out to create several film shorts for both commercial and entertainment purposes. He recently sold a series of shorts designed to show off shoes, featuring five segments of five people doing experimental dancing, to Rocco P, an Italian shoe company. And he will be submitting a commercial for Converse shoes with a political message, showing shoes walking to the left and to the right, and urging the viewer to vote.

On his web site (www.flippant.net) reel, he shows an abbreviated version of “Hold One Moment, Please,” a series of individual stories featuring the telephone, tied together by a common theme and its variations in the genres of romantic comedy, thriller, drama, and experimental to show different aspects of New York City.

“I was inspired by the 1991 movie “Night on Earth,” which featured cab drivers in five different cities around the world having different experiences. Because I made the film in 2000-01, before 9/11, I was able to use the guerrilla method to shoot the shorts that make up the forty-minute film. Back then, student filmmakers were able to go into such places as the subway with a small crew and camera, say they were “guerrilla filmmaking,” and be allowed to shoot. Over the last three to six months, cameras have actually been confiscated and film taken away from people who don’t have a permit.

Aided by the accessibility of digital and internet technology, Nectarios’ “Coffee Break” short film was well-regarded by New York City film industry viewers when it was screened at the Pioneer Theater. The favorable reviews continued when Nectarios placed the eight-minute suspense short about a woman who overheard a cell phone conversation she wished she hadn’t on Kevin Spacey’s independent film-promoting web site TriggerStreet.com.

When many movies don’t deliver thorough character and plot development in two hours, how does Nectarios garner good reviews for a film that lasts about one-sixth of an hour?

“If the short is done right, people can connect to characters in a short period of time. After all, commercials are able to do that in thirty seconds, so eight minutes is a cinch. The key is to focus on what you need to say, the meat and potatoes of the story and not the superficial details. I also leave it up to the audience to come to their own conclusions in the end. After all, there is never one clear answer. Life is never black and white; there’s always a gray line.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Leonidas’ most recent work, “Nothing Happened,” which tells the story of a woman who comes across a video of her filmmaker boyfriend in bed with another woman. As she collects her emotions, he walks in and professes his innocence when she confronts him.

“This is a point of view movie in which the audience, which sees the action through the camera’s lens through the kind of technique used by The Blair Witch Project, is part of the scene.”

Nectarios finds himself taking more chances and his storytelling, he believes, has become “deeper” with each film project. That kind of confidence has led to his entering “Nothing Happened” in the Sundance, Berlin International and Cleamont-Ferrand film festivals.

Having traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia, Nectarios has been especially influenced by European films and is pleased to see an independent film movement starting to evolve in Greece. He believes his Greek background comes through his films because, like the ancient Greek tragedies, they “are darker and left open-ended to get audiences to think. Today, everything seems to be homogenized, with the focus being on getting the money up front. There are no little stories coming out any more, so after a while, people get desensitized until a movie like ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ comes along and touches a nerve that hasn’t been touched in a long time.”

With the intent of offering other filmmakers the opportunity to showcase their work, Leonidas has created a film group, Filmblitz.org, which presents new films two or three times a year at rented venues throughout the city.

He is currently writing a feature-length film about a group of people that go to a ski lodge to relax, which begins as a character study and ends as a thriller.