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By Christopher Arnott, Hartford Courant

“Ricky,” a new feature film by Hartford-raised director Rashad Frett, was one of the breakout successes of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The film won an award in the “Directing: U.S. Dramatic” category.

The awards were announced Jan. 31. The Sundance screening during the last week of January marked the world premiere of “Ricky,” which was still being shot in the Hartford area just seven months ago. Locations included the University of Hartford campus in West Hartford.

Frett was born in Hartford, attended Hartford Public High School and graduated from the film program at ������Ƶ in New Britain in 2009. He stayed in Connecticut to work at Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy making short documentary-style films about public policy issues.

Ricky” is a feature-length expansion of an 18-minute short film with the same title that Frett made in 2023. It grew out of Frett’s thesis project when he was a graduate student in the film program at New York University. The short won awards from the Woodstock Film Festival, Palm Springs International ShortFest, Montclair Film Festival, Rhode Island International Film Festival and First Run Festival.

“Newly released after being locked up in his teens, 30-year-old Ricky navigates the challenging realities of life post-incarceration, and the complexity of gaining independence for the first time as an adult,” the film description reads. “In this warm and beautifully textured feature, director Rashad Frett journeys the interior emotional roads of Ricky, a betrayed teenager living inside of a prison-cut adult body as he attempts to integrate himself back into his Caribbean mother’s God-fearing home in Hartford, Connecticut.”

Frett wrote the “Ricky” short himself and co-wrote the feature with Lin Que Ayoung. “Ricky” is his first feature film. Short films Frett made as a writer/director include “Polaroid Stories” in 2020, “K.I.N.G.” in 2018 and “Prototype” in 2017. He has also worked as a cinematographer and editor.

As he was leaving Connecticut to study at NYU in 2016, Frett told the Hartford Courant “I want to tell stories from what I saw growing up in Hartford. To portray how valuable life is and show that once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. I want people to realize that before they act in the heat of the moment.”

The original short version of “Ricky” was screened last month at the Hartford Film Showcase at Real Art Ways. The other films on the program were all made in the area last year but the 2023 “Ricky” short was included in honor of the feature’s debut at Sundance, according to the showcase’s organizer TJ Noel-Sullivan.

In his review of the “Ricky” feature for “Variety” magazine, esteemed film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote “Frett, let me say this simply, has got it all: a gift for pace and tension and mood, for violence that can erupt out of nowhere or after a slow boil; a sixth sense for where to place the camera, so that the film is always drawing in your eye with a weaving, bobbing, voyeuristic intimacy; the gift for staging a scene in three dimensions, so that every character quivers with his or her own complex motivation; and the ability to mingle hope and despair and rage and decency in a way that, while staying true to the grit of contemporary life, chimes with what the filmmakers of Old Hollywood did. ‘Ricky’ is a movie that plunges into the depths and also lifts the spirit honestly.”

The Loud and Clear Reviews website called “Ricky” “an intimate and unflinching portrait of a man caught between the past he’s trying to leave behind and a future that remains painfully uncertain” and called Stefan James’ performance in the lead role “astounding.”

A different actor, Parish Bradley, played the role of Ricky in the short and got similarly positive reviews.

Sheryl Lee Ralph, a Waterbury native currently known for her work on the sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” plays Ricky’s parole officer in the feature. Ralph mentioned the film during her appearance on “The Today Show” last week.

The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, is part of the Sundance Institute, which offers developmental labs, fellowships and grants to support emerging filmmakers. Frett used several Sundance Lab opportunities to expand his short film into a feature. The Sundance Institute was modeled on Connecticut’s Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, which pioneered a multi-faceted program to develop new works for live theater.

No national release date has been set for “Ricky.”