About

Hal Hartley is an American filmmaker, musician and author.

Born November 3, 1959, he was raised in the working-class town of Lindenhurst, Long Island, thirty-three miles east of New York City. His first three feature films are set in Long Island (though the third, Simple Men, was actually shot in Texas).

After a year attending the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1978/1979), he enrolled in the filmmaking program of the State University of New York at Purchase where he met a core group of technicians and actors who would go on to work with him on his feature films in the years to come.

Graduating with Honors in 1984 and moving to New York City, Hartley worked at various jobs and completed three short films, the first being his graduating thesis, Kid. He shot his feature film debut, The Unbelievable Truth, in 1988 and remained very active throughout the following decade, producing the feature films Trust, Simple Men, Amateur, Flirt and Henry Fool, as well as numerous short works in film and video.

At the beginning of his career, Hartley composed and performed the music for his films under the pseudonym Ned Rifle but has used his own name for all his scores and separate album releases since 1997.

Henry Fool was awarded the prize for best screenplay at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival at about the same time he completed the short feature, The Book of Life. Shot in standard definition digital video, this hour-long French-German co-production brought Hartley’s ongoing exploration of digital media from the shorter work into a longer format, an approach he would pursue again in 2004 with The Girl From Monday.

Hartley was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from the autumn of 2001 until the spring of 2004, during which time he completed No Such Thing (2002) for Zoetrope Studios and MGM/UA, The Girl From Monday (2004), and wrote the second part of his Henry Fool Trilogy, Fay Grim. Awarded a fellowship by The American Academy in Berlin in late 2004, he lived in that city for four months and did research related to a proposed large-scale project concerning the life of French philosopher and social activist, Simone Weil. In late 2005, he relocated to Berlin to begin pre-production on Fay Grim, which was shot in February of the following year. He based his operations in Berlin for five years, completing Fay Grim, staging the opera, la Commedia, by Dutch composer Louis Andressen, and producing the short films eventually released as the collection Possible Films 2 (or PF2).

Returning to New York in 2009 and working with editor Kyle Gilman, Hartley completed the filmed concert version of Andriessen’s la Commedia and began work on Meanwhile, another short feature shot intermittently throughout 2010 and 2011. Encouraged by his work with the short PF2 pieces in Berlin, this film was intended to bring to a longer form both his new, smaller-scale working methods and a script that would come together along the way as he filmed and edited. Though Hartley hasn’t made another film in quite this way, Meanwhile did lay the foundations for the manner in which he produced his two subsequent features: the third and final part of the Henry Fool Trilogy, Ned Rifle (2014), and his most recent production in 2025, Where to Land.

Importantly, in the early years of the century, again working with Gilman, Hartley launched an online retail store, possiblefilms.com, that sold DVDs of the films he had the right to market himself along with CDs of his music and, eventually, books. This undertaking became halhartley.com in 2015 in the wake of his successful crowdsourcing campaign to raise the money to make Ned Rifle. In the years since, he has completed five successful crowdsourcing campaigns to finance the restoration in HD, and the re-release, of nearly his entire body of work to date. In 1996 he was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.

His play, Soon, commissioned by and staged at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 1998, later that year remounted in Antwerp, was also staged in California in November 2001.

He is the author of the novel, Our Lady of the Highway, the novella, Our Man, and the poetry collection, Mischief.