Hillsborough Filmmaker Lands NYC Film Premiere

A New Jersey indie feature is making the jump from local production to a New York festival screen. Karl Ryan Erikson, a filmmaker from Hillsborough, has landed a May 12 NYC premiere for *The Family Recipe* at the Big Apple Film Festival. That matters because this is the hard part for small films — not just getting made, but getting seen in a place where buyers, programmers, and other filmmakers actually gather. Erikson’s movie started as a very local family project. Now it has a real festival berth. ### What is the movie, exactly? *The Family Recipe* is a Thanksgiving family comedy. The setup is simple and very recognizable — Alison, the host at the center of the story, loses her late mother’s recipe book and has to hold the whole holiday together anyway while relatives and personal tensions pile up. Erikson has described it as a slightly edgy, broad-audience holiday comedy with a strong female lead, and the project page openly nods to the tone of older crowd-pleasers like *National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation*. (tiktok.com) ### Why is this a Hillsborough story? Because the film really did grow out of that community. Patch’s earlier reporting showed Erikson developing the project in Hillsborough with his wife, producer Caroline Digan, and their son Benjamin involved as part of the filmmaking team. He was also planning to shoot in Somerset County, not just claim New Jersey roots in the marketing after the fact. That gives the premiere a different feel — less “person from town works in movies somewhere” and more “a local production actually made it through the pipeline.” (seedandspark.com) ### How long has this been in the works? At least since mid-2024 in public view. Back then, Erikson was crowdfunding the feature and calling it his first feature film, built from an award-winning screenplay that had already picked up 19 screenplay awards on the festival circuit. The Seed&Spark campaign says the project raised $20,582 for production, which is a useful clue about the scale here — this is not a studio-backed holiday comedy, it’s a resourceful independent film assembled piece by piece. (patch.com) ### Who’s in it? IMDb lists Stacey Van Gorder as Alison Mitchell, with Chris Connell, Larky Barnes, and Jackie McCarthy among the featured cast. The listing also tags the film as completed, which is small but important news in indie-film terms. A lot of projects get announced. Fewer actually make it through production and post. Completion plus a festival screening means this one cleared the two biggest hurdles. (patch.com) ### Why does the Big Apple Film Festival matter? Because BAFF positions itself as a New York showcase built around premieres, theatrical screenings, and industry networking. The festival’s own materials pitch it as a place where filmmakers screen work in NYC while also meeting producers, managers, agents, and distributors through related events. Basically, it’s not just a room and a projector. It’s meant to be a launch window. (imdb.com) ### Is this a world premiere? The clearest confirmed detail is a New York City premiere on May 12. One festival promo on TikTok uses that exact phrasing. I couldn’t verify a separate official page calling it the film’s world premiere, so the safer read is that the NYC premiere is confirmed and anything bigger than that is still unverified from the sources I found. (bigapplefilmfestival.com) ### What’s the bigger takeaway? For local filmmakers, the real milestone is not the headline by itself. It’s the sequence: script awards, crowdfunding, local production, completed feature, then a New York festival slot. That arc is what turns a community arts story into a plausible career step. ### Bottom line? This is a modest indie-film story, but a real one. (tiktok.com) A Hillsborough project that started with family backing and local production has now reached a New York festival screen — and for filmmakers at this level, that’s where the next door can open. (patch.com)