You Have 3 Weeks To Help A Queer Filmmaker Realize Her Vision Of Love, Loss And Identity
I was on my way to class when I got the email. It was a normal day like any other: near the end of senior year, and I was itching to finish up the next two weeks of college and graduate. My BA! The future! The whole world was open to me. So, when I got the email from our Dean of Students, I promptly deleted it. You see, it had become practice at my (relatively small, liberal arts) school to receive an email from the DoS if a student passed away during the year. There were really no other reasons why that particular email would show up in my inbox. And I wasn’t interested, in this, the second-to-last week of classes, in reading some sob story about a girl I hadn’t known passing away. I just wanted to get on with my day.
So I don’t know what prompted me to retrieve the email from my trash and read it before leaving. Maybe it was curiosity — if a friend of a friend had passed, I’d likely hear about it. I couldn’t have possibly expected that it would be about a friend of mine. But, it was. A good friend. One whom I’d – almost, briefly – been more than friends with.
What struck me about her aside from her constantly upbeat attitude, was her need to create social change. Everywhere she went, she was interacting with the top of feminist scholarship – Steinem, Hillary Clinton, and more were regularly interacting with her, and she strove to make a difference with everything she did.
However, sadly, she didn’t feel she had a personal voice — she never felt completely comfortable coming out. It is the memory of this dear friend that inspired me to approach my friend and collaborator, C.C. Webster, to write a script that reflects both her struggle with identity and my own grief of having lost such an endearing individual.
The resulting script, “Gone,” is a touching and contemplative character piece that resonates with anyone who has lost a loved one. With this film, I’m striving to leave not just a personal memorial, but a legacy – that of being honest, of being open, and of being genuine with those around you.
In “Gone,” we meet Pen, played by Sandha Khin, who is a young woman trying to park her car on the way to a meeting that has her nervous. She receives a phone call from her mom, who reassures her that everything will be fine. Pen parks and heads over to a lemonade stand, where she meets Marcus, a young graphic designer who works in the area. They engage in some small talk before revealing their shared history: both Marcus and Pen at one time had dated Jimmy, a young man who has recently died in a car accident.
Pen still hasn’t dealt with her personal issues over Jimmy coming out as gay, nor has she recovered fully from his recent passing. Marcus, too, struggles with how to deal with Jimmy’s death, understanding that Pen still hasn’t fully recovered from losing her past love. Marcus gives Pen a keepsake left behind by Jimmy, which, in some small sense, brings her closure.
As a member of the LGBT community, some of the things I’ve struggled with aren’t just about the lack of representation of queer characters in film and television, but the fact that, when we do look at those representations, it’s not always written, directed, or acted with honesty.
This statement isn’t made with the intent of casting aspersions. I know the community is one big glass house, and I hope to work alongside others to keep it standing. What matters with this project is, rather, the idea that queer people are three-dimensional individuals — that the LGBT community is not defined entirely by our sexuality. (Marcus is, after all, a graphic designer, drives a Prius, and grieves over a lost love.)
On Set: Producer and Director Miranda Sajdak (left)
A major goal with this film is to reach audiences beyond just the standard queer-filmmaker and queer-film-watcher audience. “Boys Don’t Cry” wouldn’t have rocketed Hilary Swank to fame had straight viewers not championed the film along with the LGBT community. In every civil rights movement, it’s been important to include the perspectives and the aid of allies of the community. Here, I seek to do the same.
Art can liberate peoples’ perspectives in ways that activism cannot. By depicting homosexuals dealing with universal problems, not just LGBT problems, “Gone” will bridge the humanity of two worlds while upholding the importance of being true to yourself and embracing your identity.
My last film, “Snapshot,” played at the Palm Springs Film Festival, Outfest, Melbourne Queer Film Festival, image+nation in Montreal, and I won second place at the Las Vegas Cinefest script competition.
With “Gone,” I aspire to attract the eyes of all cinephiles. I am hoping to bring this film to the bigger mainstream festivals so that our message of equality gets as much visibility as possible. In order for our message to be heard, and in order for that message to make a difference, the film must be produced to the standard that the script deserves. Too often with LGBT films, the budgetary constraints lead to unpolished productions which virtually disqualify them from being accepted in to influential film festivals. When they are only accepted in to LGBT niche festivals, the films only preach to the choir.
So we are turning to the LGBT community to help us raise the funds to make something with the production value to truly stand out. I really want this film to act as a universally accepting message that anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, can connect to. I believe “Gone” has the propensity to build bridges and attract positive artistic attention both within and outside the LGBT community.
Please watch our video and consider contributing to a film that wants to make a difference.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1994266099/gone-a-short-film-about-loss-identity-and-moving-o/widget/video.html
Included in our perks is the ability make a dedication to someone you love or have lost. “Gone” is ultimately a film about grief and finding the strength to move on and we hope you’ll find meaning in this option.
Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
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Miranda Sajdak (Producer/Director)
Miranda Sajdak is a graduate of the Columbia University Film Studies program. She has worked for many years in productions in both New York and Los Angeles. Recent projects include work on ABC Family’s Huge as assistant to Winnie Holzman, work on Cloverfield, The Bourne Ultimatum, and as Assistant Director for the Elle: Make Better DVD series starring Brooklyn Decker. She recently won 2nd prize in the Las Vegas Cinefest screenwriting competition for her short film Santa Baby. Her last short, Snapshot, which she co-produced, wrote, and directed, played at both Outfest and Palm Springs, among other festivals throughout the world. See Miranda Sajdak’s full list of credits.
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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.
MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”
The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”
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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”
Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”
Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”
The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”
MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”
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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.
The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.
“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
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Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.
Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”
The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.
Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”
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President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.
That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.
His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
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The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”
Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”
There’s more.
“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”
During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:
“Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 15 major bills in 100 days. Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of double-digit unemployment, pushed for sweeping tax cuts week after week. Bill Clinton built an economic ‘war room’ before he even took office, and his team introduced what has now become a political cliché: focusing ‘like a laser beam’ on the economy. Barack Obama instituted a morning economic briefing that put the issue on par with national security. Each practiced the same principle: If you can’t solve the problem fast, at least get caught trying.”
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He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”
Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.
“The president’s most focused message on affordability is that affordability concerns are a hoax. He used that word, or an equivalent, several times on Tuesday, as he has in Oval Office remarks, in a Cabinet meeting, and on social media.”
The “unavoidable truth, no matter how hard you weave,” Dickerson wrote, is that “his argument is weak because he has to overcome people’s lived experience.”
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Image via Reuters
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