SISTER/BROTHER | FEATURE FILM

logline: When a drifting actress is invited to a dinner party at her ex-boyfriend’s Seattle home, she hastily requests her brother join her on the road trip. Together they both confront the gaping void of middle-age, the looming specter of oblivion, and endless possibilities of personal and creative rebirth.

budget:  micro

cast:  erin mcgarry, todd tschida, joe haege, jeanine jackson, salim sanchez and more

upcoming screenings: tba

director’s statement: Sister/Brother follows a struggling actress named Nora just after she accepts an invitation to a dinner party thrown by her long-ago ex-boyfriend, now a tech mogul. Nora asks her brother Scotty, a former piano prodigy and current facilities mechanic, to come along for the road trip from Portland to Seattle. On the drive there and back, Nora and Scotty confront issues of middle-age, the looming specter of oblivion, and endless possibilities of personal and creative rebirth. By film's end we witness the stirrings of Nora's transformation. A dialogue-driven mix of drama and comedy, Sister/Brother is inspired in equal proportion from films by Agnes Varda, Abbas Kiorostami, and Richard Linklater.

Sister/Brother was initiated nearly ten years ago. In 2016, after a positive experience collaborating on my first feature The Black Sea, actor Erin McGarry and I wanted to work together again. After many conversations about movies and themes we both loved, I designed the central narrative and spent a year working on the screenplay. I workshopped the script in Vermont at Stowe Story Labs and some time later crowdfunded the production budget. Production took place in Portland with locally-based cast and crew. There were three phases: part in 2020, part in 2022, part in 2024. Delays and setbacks came due to a global pandemic, scheduling conflicts, and the diminishing resources particular to microbudget filmmaking.

As a middle-aged filmmaker, navigating my own creative ambitions and real world demands, I relate deeply to Nora's fight against time and corrosive self-doubt to become the artist and person she is meant to be. The narrative at bottom is about an artist managing to create work despite the obstacles of the real world: keep the flame alive, whatever gets thrown at you or how serpentine the path may become, no matter what, don't stop

MORE TO COME