Bridge

Bridge tells the story of little Alice journeying into a different sort of Wonderland, this time with an insurmountable goal in mind: to cheat death (whatever that is) and bring her grandfather home. The story developed at the start of the 2020 pandemic - a time of grief, isolation, and - through a child's eyes - bewildering explanations for disappearing loved ones.

I approached this film with a few main goals in mind. For one, I wanted to tell a story that showed the beauty of the Savannah marshes, a place very close to my Southern heart. There's a magic to these marshes, which provided the perfect setting for me to experiment with my love of grand adventure stories, a love which has, unsurprisingly, posed interesting challenges when attempting to tell stories on an indie budget. These limitations, however, provided the stage for me to achieve my main goal - to learn and grow as a filmmaker. The process of creating Bridge was a masterclass in creativity and movie magic - in the script, it's easy to imagine a compass spinning wildly out of control - but how does one actually make that happen? How to create a "creature" that stalks Alice without having the budget for one? How can we use music to guide the emotions of viewers? Silence? I wanted to challenge myself to work on my visual storytelling skills, so my co-writer and I limited the dialogue. One of my favorite moments is showing her understanding through the fish encounter - giggling at the flopping fish, watching them grow slower and slower, then completely still....*ding* understanding floods in, followed by a confrontation of her fear (lion) and a "viking fish funeral" that allows her to grieve not only the fish, but her grandfather as well. Only when she has done that, does she see the Chinese lanterns on the shore.

As I'm sure is common with developing filmmakers, my original script is vastly different from the film you'll find on screen. Novice mistakes required that the story constantly evolve. We also faced budget restrictions (working from only 2k out of my pocket), timing restrictions (a 3 day shoot - 3 days!), and pandemic-related woes. As such, the twist ending - that Alice reaching the other side can only mean that she herself died along the way - lost some meaning and clarity from the original intention. Still, I see this short as nothing short of a miracle, and my team and I gave it everything we have.

I would love to develop this story into a feature - it wasn't until the editing phase that I realized the parallels between my story and the classic Orpheus and Eurydice tale - only here we have an eight year old Orpheus diving into the underworld to save her eighty year old Eurydice. I think that would be very fun to explore.

Thank you for taking the time to watch the film, thank you for your consideration, and I hope to join you all at your festival soon.