Just For Today

My name is Sean May.

I am a graduate film student at Art Center College of Design and the writer-director of "Just for Today."

The road I took to get here is the proverbial one less traveled. Growing up in an isolated, conservative small town in Northern Idaho didn’t leave much room for my creative dreams to grow. And yet, movies were my constant companion, responsible for shaping me into someone who could imagine a life beyond the valley I grew up in.

When I was 20 years old, I broke my neck in a freak diving accident. The injury I sustained left me paralyzed from the chest down. The years that followed were arduous, and yet I pushed through. I wouldn’t have been able to withstand those early days without the transformative power of cinema. It kept that flame in my belly burning even as the circumstances of my new life threatened to snuff it out.

Now, here I am. 31 years old, married and living in Los Angeles, CA. I can sometimes hardly believe it.

As a filmmaker, it is my goal to create work that has the chance to light that same spark in someone else. I owe a debt to the cinema that can only be paid by making movies.

The What

"Just for Today" is the tragi-comic tale of Billy. A long-time recovering alcoholic, Billy suffers a radical personal reckoning across the space of a single share at a 12-step recovery meeting.

An absurdly harrowing high-wire act of a dark comedy, "Just for Today” is a single-location monologue that becomes more visually subjective and surreal as Billy’s share wears on. This evolving visual grandiosity directly reflects the nature of the story unfolding inside Billy’s head.

Think "Clean and Sober" meets "8 1/2" with a healthy dose of the Coen Brothers. All of this takes place in the most Kubrickian-looking 12-step meeting we can muster.

The Why

There are thousands of twelve-step meetings happening every day all across the world. Sober individuals from all walks of life gather en masse, united by the progressively fatal disease that is alcoholism, to help one another along the road to recovery. “Just for Today” is the story of one such member.

There has been an effort to depict 12-step recovery in film and television, especially in recent years, coinciding with the increasing destigmatization of sobriety in mass culture. Much of that effort has gone into capturing, in a realist sense, what meetings look and sound like. Shows like "Euphoria," for example, among many others.

“Just for Today” is a film about what it feels like to be in a meeting, at your wit’s end, when refusing to speak up could be a life-or-death decision. A film that attempts to convey visually the absurdity, despair and hope that permeate these rooms while replicating the pure cringe of being held hostage in another person's headspace. Billy is buffoonish, narcissistic, bursting at the seams with regret and yet determined to do whatever he can to be a better father, husband and human.