A walk along the red carpet at Cannes. An invitation-only screening of your movie in Hollywood. Hordes of aspiring writers and directors spend a lifetime hoping to make it to the twin peaks of cinema. For Rye’s Travis Misarti, it took just under a week.

By Mitch Silver

A walk along the red carpet at Cannes. An invitation-only screening of your movie in Hollywood. Hordes of aspiring writers and directors spend a lifetime hoping to make it to the twin peaks of cinema. For Rye’s Travis Misarti, it took just under a week.

Writer-director Misarti and his co-director, Alexandra DiGiacomo, entered the 15th annual Campus MovieFest, the world’s largest film festival, while they were students at the University of Tampa. Competing against other young auteurs in here and around the world, they adhered to rules which dictate that no film run longer than five minutes or take over a week to make — from idea to final edit.

The comedy they came up with, “Tea Time”, is a bizarre tale of a clothing store heist gone horribly, and strangely, wrong. Set mainly in a storage locker where the gang has dumped their swag, the film features a gentlemanly British thug who wields a cricket bat when he learns his inept underlings haven’t robbed the cash register. Instead, they’ve stolen a van full of clothes, most of which aren’t their size, or sex.

The young directors spoke of their trip to France while lounging mogul-style around the pool at Travis’ mother’s Kenilworth Road home. Valerie Scoppa-Misarti has her own amazing film and TV credits as a set dresser for such shows as “Orange is the New Black”, “Boardwalk Empire”, “30 Rock”, “Gossip Girl”, and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”.

So, what’s it like to hobnob at Cannes? “Well, you get to be around Matthew McConaughy, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Joel and Ethan Coen, so that’s pretty incredible right there,” Travis said. “The networking is off the charts. And they give you passes to all the other films in the festival, so you can see what the other people from around the world did, and they can see yours. We got laughs in the right places, fortunately.”

Now it’s off to Hollywood in July for more screenings and more networking. “It’s not so much a question of selling ‘Tea Time’ there, but of, uh, selling myself,” Travis confided.
It’ll probably take less than a week.