Everyone knows that you can get free stuff on your birthday. Restaurants will give you some form of dessert. Bars will give you free shots. But what if you pushed it to the extreme? If you spent all 24 hours of your birthday trying to get free stuff, just how much could you get?    

“Everybody’s got all this pressure, like, oh, what am I going to do for my birthday this year? And it’s always kind of this thing to outdo themselves,” says Jason Paris, director/star of Birthday Free For All. “So I thought to myself, what does everybody want on their birthday? They want something for free … what if we spent the entire 24 hours of my birthday seeing what we can get for free just because it’s my birthday?”

Birthday Free For All, which screens Sept. 11 at the Cinema City Film Festival, documents Paris’ journey around New York in search of free stuff.

“You go to T.G.I. Friday’s, you’re getting free desserts. You’re going to Cheesecake Factory, Johnny Rockets, Chili’s, Chevys, all those places,” says Paris. But while any normal person would maybe stop at one of those in a day, Paris didn’t.

“We’re just hitting them one by one, trying to get in and out of there as fast as you can,” he says.

But the film isn’t only about the stuff you can get from the franchises. In fact, that’s not even the half of it. In the end, the story is more about human generosity than about taking advantage of free offers, but you’ll have to see it for yourself to find out what kind of random things Paris managed to get for free.

Sneak peek: One of the weirder freebies is a box of ammunition. Seriously.



For more information, visit cciff.com.