Zef Cota Is A Filmmaker For Life
By Matt Levy
There’s a scene in the 1993 Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Last Action Hero where a kid attends a midnight movie by himself because he loves cinema more than anything. The young cinephile watches the film within a film in a trance completely taken by the images on the screen. The same could be said for lifelong filmmaker and storyteller Zef Cota who just made his feature directorial debut with The Trouble. He was a kid who loved the pictures so much he made one of his own. However, as you might expect, it was a long journey from being in the audience to behind the camera to walking the red carpet at the premiere.
Cota’s parents are Albanian immigrants who married young and made their way out to the Bronx in New York City. Zef grew up in their borough and his love of film began when his family would spend time together watching movies they rented on VHS. He vividly remembers seeing Total Recall and the film leaving a lasting impression on him among many others from the early 90s that influenced his gritty and fun sensibility. From there on out, his dad would take him and his brother to the movie palace on Tuesday nights which is something they all looked forward to all week.
Zef, a true New Yorker whose favorite pizzeria is Patsy’s in Harlem, was a quiet kid who became more outgoing and assertive as he grew up and ready to assume the director’s chair. Right off the bat, he had an eye though. Cota was the kid who opted to do a video project over an oral presentation. He figured out how to connect VCRs together to do his own editing by the time he was 11. When he got his hands on his first camera, a Sony High 8, his obsession was confirmed. This is what he was destined to do.
In high school, Cota ensconced himself into the punk/hardcore scene and was the first kid at his school to buy a DVD player (this was 1998). It cost him $750 which he saved up for working two part-time jobs, DVDs were $30 at the time and the selection was pretty limited but his friends used to come over and watch DVDs when they were brand new. He was the hardest working, most disciplined, friendly punk in the hardcore scene.
After he graduated, Cota studied Business at Pace University. At the time, Zef’s tastes matured and he fell in love with the films of Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Francois Truffaut as well as classics like Godfather Part II, City of God and Memento. Like any good movie, Zef took an unusual trajectory into the world of film or his third act.
After graduating from Pace, he started a welding Ironwork business in the Bronx when he was 22 years old. However, by the time he was 25, when the business started to take off, he had an epiphany and decided life is too short to solely chase financial success. He decided to pursue his passion. He took the plunge, sold his welding equipment and purchased an editing system along with a Panasonic DVX-100B camera. This was an early camera that could film in 24P mode, or as Zef calls it, “The cinematic frame-rate”, and he just started filming anything, and everything. Live music videos for hip hop, and hardcore bands in NYC, local commercial segments for businesses on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, you name it — Zef basically said yes to everything.
He eventually forayed into making narrative short films and submitting to film festivals. He made a total of eight shorts, in which he really began to hone his craft of directing and working with actors, and leading a crew, and cultivating a distinctive visual style. He also began supporting other NYC based filmmakers by curating a monthly short film night at a theater in Times Square.
By 2016, Cota was a contracted Filmmaker for IBM and was the first person to edit a movie trailer compiled by Artificial Intelligence. It was for the 20th Century Fox film Morgan (the A.I.was IBM’s Watson) and the studio was wise to leave editorial duties in such steady hands.
Two years later, Zef was crowned Best Director at the 2018 AoF Festival in Las Vegas. Cota said, “That was an exciting sort of underdog moment, because we were such a small film and competing against so many other films from across the globe which mostly all had larger budgets than us.” He humbly added, “Then, we also won the Audience Choice Award.”
Just a year later, Zef alongside his longtime cinematographer Alex Gray and trusty producer George Rudaj released his feature directorial debut, the aforementioned The Trouble. Zef describes it as “An urban western set in the South Bronx. A story of revenge, desperation, and murder-for-hire collide when a man who’s being extorted with his girlfriend turns to a rogue hitman for fast protection.” The film is also notable for being the feature debut for lead actors John Vogel, Maria DeSimone and Christian Torres Villalobos.
The Trouble premiered at The Bronx Museum of the Arts to a sold-out and enthusiastic crowd. Cota said, “Having a room full of people love the film was an exciting and totally surreal experience.” Co-founder of The Bronx Filmmaker Collective Harri “Indio” Ramkishun added, “Zef’s a pro’s pro, the man you want on your team, the person you can lean on during any phase of the production process. He is the filmmaking equivalent to baseball’s five-tool player, he does it all.”
When he’s not calling “Action!” Zef lives with his wife Anila and their family in a modest, quiet neighborhood in a town called Harrison in Westchester or as he calls it, “The suburbs of NY.” He added, “There’s a lot of beautiful scenery near where I live.” He maintains his New York City credibility by having met his wife at the YaffaCafé in the East Village.
These days, while quarantining, Zef hosts two podcasts, FilmSEEN about cinema and filmmaking as well as a member’s only Alphabet City Films podcast. He is also currently in pre-production on his next feature film Sustenance.
Five years from now, Zef sees himself writing and directing more feature films and possibly even branching out into TV. No matter what happens- it’s movies for life. Just like the kid from The Last Action Hero, it’s in his DNA.
You can follow Zef on Twitter, Instagram, check out his site and find The Trouble on Amazon and Tubi TV.
Finally, one last Zef story that didn’t quite fit into his profile but is too good not to tell:
When Cota was 19, he was asked by hardcore guitarist Vinnie Stigma to be an extra in a movie being shot at the Guggenheim. The scene would be a hardcore band playing with punk rockers slam dancing in a circle pit.
“I didn’t know anything about the film except they paid me $50 for essentially being in a mosh pit in a museum and gave us food.” It turns out that the film was called CREMASTER 3 an avant-garde art house film directed by Matthew Barney, who was married to Bjork at the time.
A year later (this is 2002 now), Zef, a very early adopter of Netflix’s mail system, went home for the weekend while his family was on vacation. He had rented CREMASTER 3 to see what it was all about.
He poured himself some beer and was watching the film and it turned into a truly surreal moment because it was hands down the strangest film he’d ever seen and was in it!”
