A Denver native who stars in a soon-to-be-released feature film that’s screening this week got his start right here at home.
“I remember my big breakout role: I played Vlad Vladikoff in Horton Hears a Who! when I was about 5 years old, and that's where I fell in love with acting,” said Charlie Korman, 20, who launched himself as a young thespian – in a youth theater program at the Wolf Theatre Academy and Mizel Arts and Culture Center.
He is coming home to Denver from college in Los Angeles to introduce his feature debut in the film "Unspoken," written and directed by the Modern Orthodox filmmaker Jeremy Borison, on Thursday.
The acting bug bit Korman before starting grade school.
“I think my parents just put me in the [theater] camps to get me out of the house during the summer,” he joked. He fell in love with acting and was in plays at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts as a teen, said Korman, who is from the Washington Park section of Denver.
Now, he’s got the lead role playing a character called Noam in the film screening at the almost 400-seat Elaine Wolf Theatre in Denver as part of the Neustadt Jewish Arts, Authors, Movies and Music Festival. The film has been making the circuit rounds internationally and will be released by a small film company specializing in Jewish narratives in 2025, he said.
“It's about a closeted teen living in a Modern Orthodox community who finds out a potential secret about his Holocaust survivor grandfather,” said Korman, now a junior majoring in writing for screen and television at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He filmed it the summer before his Freshman year.
“I play this teen,” he said. “Obviously not a wholly accepting place for a gay teen. So he finds out a potential secret about his grandfather, and it kind of sends him on a journey to figure out, to unpack his history.”
“That's what I love about this film,” said the center’s programming director Tim Campbell, who started his job about six months ago. “It explores a lot of identities and how that intertwines in the experience of Charlie's character.”
He said he came across the film as a possible option for the festival when it was in the planning stages.
“We decided to look into this film ... that featured one of our very own alumnus ... so we thought, ‘What better of a way than to feature a film that we knew someone in?’ It was really exciting to see a Jewish-themed movie for the new festival and be able to feature someone we knew,” Campbell said.
The festival began on Sept. 2 and has already welcomed singer Nani Vazana and MSNBC host of “The Beat,” Ari Melber. Upcoming guests include comedian Rachel Feinstein and author Aimee Bikel, he said.
Korman was the only one of his siblings to love acting with the community center, an affiliate of Jewish Community Center Denver. After high school, wanting to transition to television and film, he followed his dreams to California for both his studies and career advancement.
“So I got an agent out here, and that's how I got out here,” he said during a Google meet from LA.
Korman said this film, along with his studies at USC, could propel him to bigger projects.
“Right now, I would say I want to be kind of a multi-hyphenate,” he said. “Someone like Donald Glover who writes and acts in his own things.”
The film screens at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 19, and the cost is on a sliding scale between $5 and $15.
