After a year plus working on the short film, Mary When You Follow Her, we’re finally starting to share the project with festivals. This process now is like seeing the finish line during a race and the line appears further away than it actually is. So, what to do? Pivot to what comes next with the insights and learnings gained through hard work. I’m struck by the scope and scale of the job of a filmmaker. Before we find a story or know what story we’re going to tell we have a desire to share fire itself with the viewer. The great film artist RaMell Ross described filmmaking as the synthesis of human consciousness. When I read Carmen Maria’s short story in an anthology collection her unique consciousness leapt off the page. I wondered how I could translate the feeling: a story told in one long sentence with these powerful moments in the protagonist’s life separated only by commas. Adapting the story into a screenplay, together with Lucemy Perez, I shortened the distance between the protagonist and the audience and made Maria the narrator of her own story. All of these disparate moments in this young woman’s life build to a letter that she writes to her mother and pins to the fridge. I thought about Stephen King’s insight on writing, that we always write, whether we know it or not, to someone specific. I thought about how true that idea is as applied to this story, and this led me to translate the voiceover into Spanish–the language Maria speaks to her mom. I’m grateful to the immensely talented Carmen Maria Machado for granting us this opportunity. The project brought together artists and friends and we all put a piece of ourselves in this film. Like I shared above, now there is no wait and see, there's just the next reality and my renewed desire to share something good with you.
