HWS News
8 April 2026 HWS Student’s Film Selected for Boston Festival
Elise Henry ’28’s short film “Wasted” will debut in Boston after evolving beyond a classroom assignment.
Elise Henry ’28 has “always had a passion” for film and video editing, and she’s channeled that passion into something great. Her short film “Wasted” has been accepted into the Design Student Film Festival, April 9-11 in Boston.
Henry shot the film on the Hobart and William Smith campus for her final project in Instructor of Media and Society Casey Puccini’s film editing class. Instead of standard student films focused on dialogue, Henry used color and music to represent her characters’ feelings.
“She took it and made it something really special,” Puccini says.
“I got really into it and turned it into a more festival-ready film,” says Henry, who went beyond the rubric for the final project and “put more of myself into it.”
This was Henry’s first film class at HWS, but she brought some experience with her. She grew up in North Andover, Mass., in a household of Disney movie junkies. “I probably watched one every single day,” she says.
Henry plays guitar and piano, and she posted some of her music on her YouTube channel when she was in high school. “Sometimes I made videos with my music. I love putting everything together and watching it come to life.”
So, she had some technical skill when she arrived in Puccini’s classroom in the fall. “She is, to a certain degree, an autodidact,” says Puccini, noting she became adept with software in high school. “In my class, she figured out the craft – why to cut and where to cut.”
In the process, Puccini, Henry says, “became a mentor to me. There were times that I would go down to his office and we would just storyboard and shoot out ideas.”
Puccini says his role was to provide encouragement and support. “Just doing [a film] is a daunting thing,” he says, so “having someone you can bounce [an idea] of off is helpful.” It’s about reassuring the budding filmmaker that “they’re not alone, that they’ll get some thoughtful response.”
Out of all of this came “Wasted,” a story about a day in the life of a young college woman who has an epiphany – that she was in a miserable romantic relationship. She “wakes up to the truth she’s been avoiding – that her relationship is failing,” Henry says. The film follows a college woman realizing her relationship is failing, culminating in a fragmented montage of memories that reveals its underlying tension. This, Henry says, is the “cinematic expression of the hurt that she had to go through and the fights she had to endure. … You don’t find out until the end how much animosity there was in the relationship.”
The film is not based on personal experience, Henry says. Rather, it was inspired particularly by a 2004 movie, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” whose main characters, played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, undergo memory erasure. Henry says she “fell in love” with the movie the first time she watched it several years ago and says she was particularly struck by its tag line: You can erase someone from your mind but getting them out of your heart is another story.
“I like raw, realistic, heartbreaking, devastating – any word you can think of,” she says. “I like writing these sad things and putting them on the screen.”
The film was shot in Stern Hall and Comstock Hall, where Henry lives on campus. Henry plays the lead, and she’s supported by Rory McCarthy ’27 in the role of her best friend and Daniel Wechsler ’27 as the boyfriend.
“My passion for the arts and film I can’t even put into words,” Henry says. “I have been really hesitant to pursue film as a career, and I probably won’t, but this is something I don’t want to die out. … I put so much hard work into it, and so much love.”
It is that combination that got her film accepted into the festival and landed it on the screen at the legendary Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. [view the 2026 Festival Program] This will give Henry a sense of her peers’ more established filmmakers’ work, Puccini says. “It’s also super-important to watch your work in front of an audience. They’re always the ultimate judge.”
Photo: Instructor of Media and Society Casey Puccini works with Elise Henry ‘28 on her short film project.
