It's got to be pretty exciting to have your short battle its way into this year's Festival through Delta's Fly-In Movies contest, and this year's winner, The Eight Percent, is a sweet story about two lovers reconnecting.

"It's such a small story," said director Alexander Poe, a 28-year-old Columbia grad student, "it's one scene in real time. It's a piece of people lives that are life changing in a way." The root of the script came from a playwrighting festival, and Poe described it thusly: "Have you ever been in the Reanimation Library in Brooklyn? For the Festival, they sent five playwrights blindfolded into this library, and we each had to pick out a book and write a scene that incorporated something from that. I had picked a book called Biology For Every Man. I remembered this story that my cousin had told me about bees, and that vaguely related to biology, and I went from there."

Serendipitiously, Poe and star Benjamin McKenzie (late of The O.C., amazing in Junebug, currently in NBC cop show Southland), who had met each other at the Williamstown Theatre Festival years ago, had been looking for something to do together. "The idea with Ben is that this will be the bridge to working on a feature," said Poe. (They had met when Poe and McKenzie worked on a stage adaption of Paul Auster's City of Glass.)

But before Poe can get going on a feature, well, he's got other things to attend to: so what are you going to do with your two round-trip Business Class Delta tickets to ANYWHERE?

"It's between Europe and Tokyo. I 've never been to Japan and I love Japanese films."
 

The Eight Percent screens in the Shorts: Mixed Feelings program.

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