The most NYU movie ever made

Chronovisor is a literary noir shot on 16mm film about a device that supposedly broadcasts the past, based on a conspiracy theory about a 1950s Benedictine monk. Co-directors Jack Auen and Kevin Walker made it in 2025 with a crew that was largely NYU. Auen graduated this spring with a joint MBA and MFA from Stern and Tisch, and he says it is the most NYU born-and-bred production there could be, even though the school was not officially involved.

The team leaned on university resources at every step. Auen pitched the film to investors three times in an NYU class on film packaging before taking it outside, and used his student ID for discounts on rental gear and Kodak stock. Leo Zhang, from the graduate film programme, shot it on a 16mm Aaton camera he owned. Jason Zuriff, a cinema studies alumnus, produced, and Alex Peña, a Tisch design graduate, built the production design. They found their lead, the obsessive scholar Beatrice Courte, by watching a TED Talk: Anne-Laure Sellier teaches at HEC Paris and is an adjunct associate professor at Stern. She nearly deleted the director’s email as a scam.

The film premiered in January in the Netherlands, had a sold-out North American premiere in April, and, as of the student paper’s August report, was due at Film at Lincoln Center on September 4. Is the Chronovisor real? The cast and crew disagreed. Sellier said flatly no; Auen said it depends on the time of day.