Event Details
Mon, September 29, 2025
18:00 – 19:30
VILLA SASSETTI
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Florence, Italy
The Holdovers – Film Screening
Followed by a conversation with the film screenwriter David Hemingson
Released | OCT 27, 2023 | COMEDY, DRAMA | 2HR 14MIN
From acclaimed director Alexander Payne, The Holdovers follows a curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker (newcomer Dominic Sessa) — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).
Featured Biographies
David Hemingson
SCREENWRITER AND PRODUCER
David Hemingson is a veteran television writer who in 2023 made one of the most astonishing feature film debuts in recent memory as screenwriter and producer of Focus Features’ widely acclaimed The Holdovers, directed by Oscar® winner Alexander Payne, marking Payne’s second project he did not write.
Following its world premiere at Telluride, The Holdovers immediately became an awards juggernaut, earning five Academy Award® nominations, including Best Original Screenplay for Hemingson’s work and Best Picture. Hemingson’s screenplay was a focal point of the film’s considerable acclaim, netting him 38 nods from critic associations and awards bodies, including a BAFTA nomination for Best Original Screenplay in addition to winning the National Board of Review’s Best Original Screenplay as well as the Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Original Screenplay.
A Hollywood mainstay for nearly three decades, Hemingson’s prolific television work includes writing and producing credits across single- and multi-camera sitcoms, one-hour dramas, procedurals, young adult series, animation, and more.
Among his television highlights, he created, executive produced and wrote the Fox comedy series, Kitchen Confidential, based on Anthony Bourdain’s memoir and starring Bradley Cooper. The pilot earned Hemingson a WGA Award nomination for Outstanding Episodic Comedy. He also wrote and produced series as diverse as Whiskey Cavalier, Just Shoot Me, American Dad, Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Black-ish, and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, among many others.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in West Hartford, Hemingson attended the Watkinson School in Hartford before going on to earn his BA in American Studies from Yale University, and then a law degree from Columbia University. After a brief tenure in the entertainment department of a prominent Century City law firm, he transitioned to television writing full-time starting in 1995.
He currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Victoria Morsell Hemingson. They are the proud parents two sons, Nicholas and Ian.