The Lesson

I made this film as part of a class at FAMU in Prague. Coming into the film, one of my main goals was to try and portray something real in the city; so often film students end up creating works that take place outside of any real location and take on a fantastic quality. And it would have been easy in a historic, beautiful city like Prague to make a film with a storybook quality, or evoke a vacation spot, or focus on the experience of the expat American trying to navigate a foreign space. Instead, I focused on themes that transcended our differences from our Czech characters; I looked at friendships between women, especially teenage friendships where girls try to fit in while also making important decisions regarding their inner selves. I know I have been in many situations where I have had to decide whether I was going to keep trying to fight for a friendship or stick to the moral path I wanted to follow. Theft was also a big subject for me as I was working on our idea, the ways in which immorality can become necessity, when we choose our desires with the knowledge that it is transgressing boundaries and hurting others in the process, and the strange way in which a thief might feel connected to their victim through their personal items. Dementia and aging factored in later to my film, but as I had to try and face the difficulties of portraying this disability realistically and sympathetically, I realized how much we wanted to stick with it and try and make sense of it, especially in memory of the loved ones I’ve had who have slowly faded away from me.

It is so rare to get the opportunity as an undergraduate student to make your own films at the level of quality I was afforded at FAMU--I was given a huge amount of support from their graduate students, along with professors supervising heavily for quality control. I really tried to take advantage of that by creating a challenging work, one that wasn’t written with the limitations of a small budget in mind. Even though there were many elements of my film that ended up taking a lot of ingenuity and a bit of luck, from making a film in a language I barely spoke, to including a music lesson on an instrument I didn’t play, to filming in public locations around Prague, I never regretted challenging myself with these elements. - Marielle Heydt