The Hour After Westerly

Filmed on Whidbey Island, this award-winning short film is the story of a very precise man who mysteriously loses track of time and is presented with a mystery.

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

This movie is haunting, peaceful, and a bit of a mystery, just like where it was filmed.

Los Angeles filmmakers Nate Bell and Andrew Morehouse had a dream to bring “The Hour After Westerly” to life, a thrilling short story about the paths in life we might have taken. Originally published in the New Yorker in 1947, this Robert M. Coates story stayed with the creative duo a long time, and drove them to form their company Bellhouse Productions.

Never doing things by half measures, the pair decided to cast some big names and shoot on location in another state. With family ties to Whidbey Island, Bell knew just the place.

The resulting short film is a gorgeously eerie tale, told on a backdrop of Central Whidbey locations and featuring the famous faces of Peter Jacobson and Shannyn Sossamon. If you were at WICA for last year’s Whidbey Island Film Festival, you may have met the filmmakers or seen them awarded the Grand Jury Prize for best short film. This is one of a collection of prizes Westerly has scooped up in the last couple years, as it tours the film festival circuit and navigates COVID-19 disruptions.

Westerly has been selected for film festivals coast to coast, including three Oscars-qualifying festivals. After being nominated in eight different categories at FirstGlance, it took the honor of Debut Short Film as well as Best Actor award for Jacobson in the lead role (also nominated at the Burbank International Film Fest).

They’ve been selected for famous indie festivals like Julien Dubuque in the Midwest and WorldFest-Houston, where cinematographer William Hellmuth won another well-deserved award.