Interview: Michelle Vezilj Brings 300 FEET TALL to New York
The actress, singer-songwriter, and filmmaker brings her deeply personal musical fantasy to the Chelsea Film Festival.
Long before 300 FEET TALL became a short film, Michelle Vezilj was dancing around an empty Los Angeles apartment. Her best friend had died. She could not find a job. Her apartment was more expensive than she could afford. In the middle of that despair, a song unexpectedly arrived. “I was just dancing around my furnitureless apartment and this gorgeous, beautiful, hopeful song trickled into my head and it became an anthem for me to pull myself out of the muck,” Vezilj recalls.
Nearly a decade later, that anthem has grown into something much larger. 300 FEET TALL, Vezilj’s genre-bending musical fantasy, recently made its world premiere at the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival in Los Angeles. Now, the short film will be making its New York debut at the 2026 Chelsea Film Festival, bringing a project with Broadway-sized ambitions one step closer to the city where Vezilj ultimately hopes it will live.
“It’s a dream come true,” she says. “300 FEET TALL has never had an iteration in New York. We’ve only been on the West Coast. Bridging that gap is a dream come true, and it ultimately opens this conversation to a whole new audience of people.”
The short stars Sonja O’Hara as Mika, a woman at a breaking point who finds herself transported into a mythological landscape where she encounters her younger self, played by Colette Goodman. Mark St. Cyr and Drew Moerlein also star.
For Vezilj, however, Mika’s journey is intensely personal. “300 FEET TALL is a fantastical autobiography of my dark night of the soul,” she explains. “I went through a very challenging Saturn return. And, for those of you that don’t know what a Saturn return is, it’s just a time in your late 20s where you go through a massive change. You get tired of playing the role that you once played, and you grow into the person that you came here to be. So, 300 FEET TALL is encompassing that growth.”
Originally conceived as a stage musical during the pandemic, the project followed Vezilj back to Los Angeles, where it became a movie musical. A presentation of its music at the Troubadour eventually attracted an investor, leading to the short film as a proof of concept.
Its mythology has continued expanding along the way. Vezilj has developed 300 FEET TALL as a feature film, episodic pilot, and also as a stage production. The larger versions incorporate the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne alongside the Lemurians, a fantastical civilization Vezilj describes as living within Mount Shasta.
Yet, the 10-minute short strips that mythology back to its emotional core and presents Mika and the child she once was. Vezilj, who is also a hypnotherapist, says her work helped inspire that encounter. “There are rare occurrences where instead of the inner child or the inner self needing something from the adult, it’s actually the adult that needs something from the child,” she elaborates. “A lot of the time what’s needed is hope and reassurance.”
That hope becomes enormous against the film’s setting among California’s towering sequoias. What was supposed to be a sunny shoot unexpectedly became a snowstorm, creating logistical headaches for the first-time film director but also giving her images she could never have manufactured. “Honestly, I could not have paid for this production value. It is gorgeous,” Vezilj says of the visuals the snowstorm allowed her to capture.
.PNG?format=auto&width=800)
The shifting weather ultimately mirrored Mika’s journey, while the trees themselves became another storyteller. “Hope, when you’re in the depths of despair, can feel very overwhelming and impossible,” she explains. “That journey from not having hope into hopefully getting there is the essence of that towering, overwhelming feeling of those trees. You’ll feel like, ‘Okay, I’m surrounded by it, and yet I cannot achieve it.’”
Music provides another bridge between those emotional worlds. Vezilj grew up in musical theater and cites WICKED and HADESTOWN among the inspirations for 300 FEET TALL. Her approach begins with a familiar theatrical principle. “When dialogue doesn’t cut it, you move into song,” she points out. “I’m just such a fan of music and its ability to have us feel things that we cannot feel when we’re having a conversation.”
Seeing those ideas projected onto a movie screen at HollyShorts proved emotional. “I cried multiple times,” Vezilj remembers. “This is a dream of mine to put something I’ve created up on a big screen. And it was a dream come true.”
The screening also showed her that something born from an intensely personal experience could belong to other people. “It was really amazing to speak with people after and see how a story that’s personal to me could be so personal to them,” she reveals. “That’s all that one could hope for.”
Creating the short has also changed the larger 300 FEET TALL. Condensing the story forced Vezilj to identify its “beating heart,” inspiring her to return to the feature screenplay and rewrite it. “Getting to the proof of concept helped me to see the simple meaning behind this fantastical journey,” she states. “And I was able to get in there and create something that’s very tangible and digestible.”
The 2026 Chelsea Film Festival represents the next step, but not necessarily the final destination. Vezilj still dreams of 300 FEET TALL becoming a live theatrical experience, perhaps even on Broadway. “At the end of my life, 300 FEET TALL in a New York space is what I want to leave behind as a legacy,” she says. “It’s the top of the top, the ultimate.”
For now, she hopes audiences at Chelsea leave looking backward at their own lives a little differently. “You could not be who you are now if you did not have those past versions of yourself,” Vezilj mentions. “My goal is to help people dream big and then dream bigger.”
300 FEET TALL may have been born from despair, but Vezilj has spent nearly a decade turning it into an argument for hope. “I just want people to go out and do the things that they came here to do,” she says, “because there’s so much beauty in humans, and it needs to be expressed.”
300 FEET TALL will play in Chelsea Film Festival’s PROGRAM #8 — THE INNER WORLD on Friday, October 16 at 6:30 PM at Regal Battery Park (102 N End Ave, New York). Tickets and additional information are available at ChelseaFilm.org/300-Feet-Tall.
