My Apocalyptic Thanksgiving movie was accepted at the Entr’2 Marches International Film Festival in Cannes, France.
It’s a film festival that focuses on the disability community that is often ignored or sidelined in movies and tv series. Disabilities includes both mental and physical.
It was a world premiere. Holly and Richard (me) both went all the way to Cannes, France. I said, “I wouldn’t miss our premiere for the world. It’s such a joy to share the movie with a room full of strangers in the dark”.
We got a chance to walk around the Cannes Film Festival which was happening around the same time. We checked out the media madness and over listen to conversations in so many different languages. The atmosphere was electrifying. We passed out flyers and informed others to check out the other film festival down the street Entr2 Marches Film Festival. It translates to, ‘Between 2 steps’. It means that you are hidden. That you can’t quite make it up the next step.
I was a bit nervous the day of. With Rachel Dunn-Garcia’s help we finished the French subtitles just in time. We brought an extra copy of the movie on different formats just in case.
Watching the movie in a dark room full of strangers was pretty exciting. They knew nothing about the film except that there were special needs and zombies in it. I think that combination always perks people’s interest.
In the program, our logline was changed to cater to a European crowd. Here’s the logline:
C’est l’histoire d’une obsession... C’est l’histoire d’une quête...
C’est l’histoire de plusieurs rencontres...
C’est une histoire autour du sens de la famille...
Est-ce l’histoire de la différence, sans l’indifférence ?
The story of an obsession...
It's a story of a quest.
It's the story of several encounters.
It's the story about the meaning of family.
Is it the story of difference, without indifference?
People chuckled, laughed and were at the edge of their seat. I could see people lean forward in the dramatic parts. It’s always a joy to share the movie.
Afterwards, we were invited up to say a few words about the film. We talked about the inspiration and the making of the film. People were so curious about us and our film that our Q&A lasted for half an hour. Who were we? What does this film mean to us? We explained how we’ve been taking care of special needs adults for several years. One of the other reasons is they wanted to understand how people with special needs are taken care of in California especially South Central Los Angeles as opposed to France. The whole concept of having rights and autonomy were curious to them.
Many of the audiences were made up of people who worked in some sort of social services. They tended to be older people who worked with the handicap population as well as senior citizens. Holly and I agreed this is our audience.
One person said, one day we won’t need a disability film festival because they’ll just be included in all film festivals. We highly recommend Entr’2 Marches Film Festival. We hope that more filmmakers make room to include people with special needs and other disabilities in all their complexities and silliness.
We gave David, the film festival director a t-shirt, My Apocalyptic Thanksgiving. It was an apocalyptic event.
