Screenings, Selections, and other excitement

Good things have been happening on several fronts lately. If you’ve been to the Enid’s Wall page you’ll have noticed the laurel leaves from Auckland International Film Festival. It’s our first official selection, which is a wonderful boost of confidence as I continue the search for a producing partner.

In the world of Young of the Year, I have been invited to a screening and discussion with the Brooklyn Bird Club on July 17th at 7pm. If you’re in the NYC area it is free and open to the public at the main branch of the library: 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238. There will be a Q&A after with folks who possibly know more about the birds than I do. Here’s hoping they ask me a lot of filmmaking questions. We also got a gold award from the Spotlight Short Film Awards, and are an official selection with Cinema WorldFest Awards, and Impact DOCS Awards. 

And at the start of June we shot Grandpa’s Getaways. I had a fantastic team and the post production is going really well. Can’t wait to start showing it to people. Here’s a sneak peek.

Thoughts about Enid’s Wall

I am working on grant proposals so that I can guarantee a producer a salary for at least long enough for us to find the rest of the money we will need to make the film. It’s a good process because it is forcing me to think about the film in a deeper and also broader way. Not just story structure and character development, or locations and logistics, all the practical things that have been on my mind for a while. Now I’m thinking about themes and artistic expression. Why am I telling this story and why am I telling it in this way? So here is what’s on my mind this weekend:

Enid’s Wall is a film about belonging. What does it mean to belong somewhere? What kinds of choices and sacrifices might one make to fit in. And how does each person’s line in the sand shift over time. The protagonist, Enid, is a woman in her 60s, but there is nothing about her story that is unique to her gender or generation. Americans in the 21^st Century move frequently, and for a plethora of reasons: to be closer to their kids, to be closer to their parents, to find a better job, because their spouse found a better job. In every new place, we need to find a new community. How do you find the people who are like you? How much do you change yourself to be like the people you find? These are the questions that Enid’s Wall explores.

At the same time, the protagonist is a woman in her 60s. Her lifetime of experiences influence the choices that she makes as she starts this new phase of her life. It was a deliberate choice to tell this story through a character of her gender and generation. There are roughly 75 million baby boomers in America right now, but rarely do the women of this generation get to see themselves in film. And when they do it is almost always as the male protagonist’s (often nagging) mother. Rarely are they every day people with the same every day issues as everyone else. It is important not just for these women to see themselves, but for the rest of the world to see them as characters worthy of our empathy.