Omaha Film Festival 2009

Amerigo the Brave is a new short film from writer-director Jonathan Tvrdik. Intimate and fiercely honest, it is a morality play that delves into the shocking manipulation and greed that make us distinctly human.It is Brooklyn, 1946, and all hopes the young Amerigo Cortina (Jon Purcell) once had for his fledgling circus are quickly circling the drain. Desperate to attract any press he can get, Amerigo secretly lets leak to the papers that his new star from Germany, Jacob Diefendorf (Bill Hutson), may or may not have been a Nazi. So delighted is Amerigo that his plan has worked, he spends the first big night in the circus' history with his head in the clouds, relegating his blind wife, Josephine (Nora Vetter), the most demeaning of tasks.Unfortunately for all concerned, it is because of his coldness that Josephine lets slip to Jacob Amerigo's deceit and the future of the three, which all were seemingly intertwined, comes crashing down in one night.