East Brunswick Student’s Short Film Part Of New Jersey Film Festival

EAST BRUNSWICK, NJ — East Brunswick resident Madeline “Maddy” Hettrick’s short film will be screened at the 2025 New Jersey Film Festival.

A student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Hettrick is pursuing a double major in filmmaking at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and English at the School of Arts and Sciences.

She initially wanted to be in front of the camera. But then she decided to get behind it. Hettrick wrote and directed “His New Girl” as a sophomore.

The film which started out as a class project will now be featured in the 2025 Spring New Jersey Film Festival.

Hettrick described the short film as “a comedy sprinkled with dramatic moments.” It focuses on three college students (performed by Mason Gross students Ashavari Bhattacharya and Meg Moynahan and Yasemin Goncu, who also attended Rutgers) hanging out in their apartment as one gets ready for a date with her boyfriend.

“I like to go into the relationships between characters and just try to figure out the ins and outs of people's minds,” the 20-year-old said.

A series of short films, including Hettrick’s 5-minute piece, will be screened at 7 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 24, in Room 105 of Voorhees Hall, 71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick.

“We go out of our way to show films by New Jersey residents as well as Rutgers faculty and students, but they have to be good enough,” said Al Nigrin, who is the executive director, curator and founder of the Rutgers Film Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Center, which presents the film festival. “Our judges felt Madeline's film fits that bill.”

According to Nigrin, Hettrick’s film is well edited, has excellent sound and is well crafted. “It is perfect for our festival given that our student audience will surely relate to its story. It is a no-brainer to screen it,” Nigrin said.

A fan of actor and screenwriter Mindy Kaling, Hettrick got bit by the movie bug while attending East Brunswick High School. She took three pre-college digital filmmaking classes at Mason Gross as well as courses offered through her high school.

“They all centered around becoming comfortable with a camera by participating in different in class exercises with the equipment,” said Hettrick. By the end of each course, she had completed at least one short film from a script she had written.

“I originally wanted to join them because I was interested in acting,” said Hettrick, who during the summer worked at Mason Gross as a teacher assistant. “I thought that if I joined film classes, I would be able to act in other people's films. But I was immediately drawn to filmmaking more so than acting. I just loved being able to be behind the camera and being able to give actors advice on what to do and be the one driving the story and coming up with different plot points. That always really interested me.”

Hettrick, whose older brother Nathaniel attends Rutgers Business School, said she added English as a second major at the beginning of her sophomore year, “and that was through the realization that my favorite part of filmmaking is screenwriting.”

Scheduling the filming of His New Girl proved tricky. Hettrick said she had a three-hour window to shoot her film, a class project for “Intermediate Film Production II.”

“Madeline had a very strong sense of what she wanted to achieve with this project and, obviously, executed it extremely well,” said Christopher McCarroll, a filmmaking lecturer at Mason Gross.

After graduation, Hettrick said she is considering graduate school – specifically with a concentration in screenwriting.

General admission tickets for the New Jersey Film Festival are $15; student tickets for the in-person screening are $10.

Have a correction or a news tip? Email sarah.salvadore@patch.com