Sibylant Sisters
Logline: Growing up with a stuporous witch instead of a mother, the young Sibylant Sisters, Caleum and Terra, must fend for themselves in a sometimes delightful, sometimes terrifying world of ogres, gnomes, maleficent toads, enchanted paper dolls and the Wee Witch Katarina. If they want to survive, they'll need to learn how to make their own magic.
Synopsis: At the end of a dirt road lies a dismally enchanted fog-shrouded Grey House where Caelum (8) and her sister Terra (11) are held captive by the Wee Witch Katarina. Katarina, her husband Garrdenia, the life-sized Garden Gnome, and a scraggly, possum faced hanger-on called The Ogre Minkie are all, in turn, captives of the noxious, belching Well of Toads out in the backyard.
Caelum and Terra attempt to live normal lives outside the Grey House, seeking refuge in the homes of neighboring kids. Momma Addey, matriarch of the Klank clan and mother of Caelum’s horse riding tom-boy role model Hutch (14), loves to make breakfast before school and welcome Caelum and Terra into the warmth of her large home, while the glittery rollerskating Bell (12) and her mother Arlette bring sparkle, joy, and a watchful eye to the dirt road.
One day after the Wee Witch Katarina summons the courage to run off Ogre Minkie, and the dismal air of the Grey House begins to lighten, Katarina’s sister, Paper Jeannie, arrives. She is, as her name suggests, a bright, colorful paper doll. The girls adore her, but Jeannie is a radically destabilizing presence. During an argument with Katarina, fissures appear. When pushed to the limits of stress and memory, Jeannie rips in half, rejoining as one in a series of different personalities, each of which hold a piece of the history that Katarina is desperate to avoid. Jeannie blames Katarina for the darkness that enshrouded their own childhoods, and Jeannie’s accusations push Katarina toward an increasingly dangerous instability. Nonetheless, Jeannie leaves behind clues to help Caelum and Terra on their journey out of the Grey House, and gifts them with a music box, handed down generation by generation, from the blessed and the cursed of their family heritage.
Tuning into the comforting song of the music box, and the sweet smell of Gnome Garrdenia’s flowers, Caelum has a vision which leads her to Rasp and Elly, who live in a doll-house like caravan in the forest. Rasp tells Caelum and Terra a story about a young girl's childhood, how she came to be in the thrall of a place just like Katarina's Well of Toads, and cursed to be a witch with no powers. This piece of the puzzle awakens a curiosity about Katarina, and an acceptance that she might indeed be the girl’s mother. This leads to an inversion - a desire to protect Katarina as she begins to visibly unravel. When Rasp and Elly too move on, they leave behind another tool. A set of headphones which allow the girls to listen below the surface of things, and tune in to the darkness that is trapped inside The Well of Toads.
As the girls tease out the mystery of their circumstances and their ancestry, Caelum finds herself relying more and more on inner dreams and visions - a space she must navigate alone, without the reliable, stabilizing presence of her sister, Terra. Caelum is both drawn toward these visions and the promises they hold, and scared that they herald the same kind of instability which mars the lives of Katarina and Jeannie. Now, already in over her head, Caelum must face navigating the terrain between imagination, intuition, and the deep, dark cursed place her mother, Katarina endures.
As Halloween approaches, Caelum confesses visions of foreboding to her gang of girls, Hutch, Bell, and Terra, who rally together, creating power costumes which embolden them to be on the ready for any dangers ahead.
On Halloween day, Katarina succumbs to her own foreboding nightmares. Convinced she is protecting her children from an unseen, unstoppable force, Katarina unexpectedly shoves Caelum into The Well of Toads. Terra, finding her own voice against the will of Katarina, instead, finally escapes and runs for help. In the belly of The Well, Caelum has a direct confrontation with traumatic ancestral legacies. Experiencing depths of terror and a visceral understanding of the pain that drives Katarina to The Well, Caelum is overcome by a bolt of forgiveness and compassion which wakes her up to her own magic, empowering her to break out of The Well of Toads.
Under the full moon of Halloween night, Caelum, Terra, Hutch and Bell band together to form the Sibylant Sisters. Drawing on things which gave them strength to survive the dirt road, they concoct a spell to defeat the toxic enchantment of The Toad Well, creating a haven for imagination, transformation, and Sibylant Magic.
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Callie CurryWriter
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Meagan BrothersWriterDebbie Harry Sings in French; Supergirl Mixtapes; Weird Girl and What's His Name
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Project Type:Screenplay
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Number of Pages:102
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Country of Origin:United States
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Language:English
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First-time Screenwriter:Yes
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Student Project:No
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Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
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[Meagan Brothers] 2009 ALA Best Book for Young Adults
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[Meagan Brothers] Kirkus Review's Best Teen Books of 2015
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[Callie Curry] 2022 Sundance Institute | Maja Kristin Directing Fellowship
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[Meagan Brothers] 2022 Sundance Institute | Feature Film Program Grant
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[Callie Curry] Sundance Institute | The Adrienne Shelly Foundation Women Filmmakers Grant
Caledonia Curry, or Swoon, is recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork. Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the relationships of individuals to the built environment, using her art as a catalyst for social change and healing.
Swoon is best known as one of the first women street artists to gain international recognition. However, her expansive practice defies genre. As a classically trained printmaker, she has innovated new approaches to large-scale relief, screenprint and papercutting. The deep consideration of form is inseparable from Curry’s vision of the transformative role of public art in communities. Her critical engagement with issues of social and environmental justice have positioned her at the forefront of the emergent discourse around socially-engaged practice. Her commitment to expanding the possibilities of art to repair trauma and foster personal and collective healing continues to drive her substantial contributions to contemporary art through experimentation with portraiture, sculpture, installation and most recently, stop-motion animation.
Curry’s gallery and museum exhibitions are deeply influenced by her activism and community projects outside of traditional gallery spaces. In 2015 she founded the Heliotrope Foundation to support multiple collaborative projects that use art to respond to crisis. These include Konbit Shelter, a sustainable building project developed in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti; Music Box Village, an immersive musical environment built to and address the cultural toll of Hurricane Katrina by fostering collaborations between the New Orleans’ creative community and artists from around the world; and Braddock Tiles, a job-readiness and soft skills training program for local youth that responds to the decades-long disinvestment and economic crisis in Braddock, Pennsylvania.
Curry’s recent work has been focused specifically on the relationship of trauma and addiction, drawing from her experience growing up in an opioid addicted family. In 2015, she developed The Road Home in collaboration with Philadelphia Mural Arts and the Million Person Project to serve a community ravaged by the opioid epidemic in North Philadelphia. The project included daily drop-in art therapy workshops and an ambitious advocacy component that culminated with harm-reduction workshops with the Philadelphia Department of Health and a public symposium.
Curry has a long history of executing projects of ambitious scale and vision. The most notable is a series of floating sculptures and experimental living projects that include The Miss Rockaway Armada (Mississippi River, 2006-2007); Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (Hudson River, 2008); and the Swimming Cities of Serenissima (Adriatic Sea), which crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Curry has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden; MIMA Contemporary Art Museum, Brussels, Belgium; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her first museum retrospective was The Canyon: 1999–2017 at the CAC Cincinnati. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and MASS MoCA.
Current projects include The House Our Families Built, a major public art commission in collaboration with PBS American Portrait; as well as a feature length stop-motion animation that will be filmed in her family home. The film, currently in pre-production, is supported by the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program.
Statement from Callie Curry:
The story is a fairy tale fictionalization of my own life experiences.
Physically set in the backyard of my childhood home, the script takes a fantastical look at a series of events that occurred right where the film will be created - this in itself feels like a strange and magical circumstance.
As a young child, I grew up in a family that struggled with addiction and severe mental illnesses such as Dissociative Identity Disorder. During a particularly difficult period, my mother suffered a psychotic breakdown, which was both terrifying and dangerous for my sister and me.
I spent many years running from and ignoring the realities of my childhood. Later in life I came to accept that I bore deep scars from having grown up in those circumstances, and that I had PTSD from this particular episode.
As I allowed myself to become honest about these painful truths, and to engage in therapy and other healing work, I went through a transformational process of coming to understand the legacy of intergenerational trauma that had created the instability in my family, and I became able to forgive the people who had caused so much harm.
Through this transformation, my art practice changed significantly. I discovered that I wanted to speak publicly about my experiences and my art became much more vulnerable and honest. I had been given a gift and I felt the burden implicit in every gift - the need to share and pass It on.
Right now we are in the middle of a cultural paradigm shift in how we understand trauma, and its role in creating patterns of addiction and mental illness. I find myself asking - what films will be created by people whose lives have been changed by this shift? How will those films shift how we see and understand one another?
Having come to such a profoundly different understanding of my own family than the one I was handed as a child, or the one still portrayed by conservative institutions, I feel drawn to create stories from inside this new and more compassionate knowledge.
The story is about my own life, spoken in the very personal voice of a child trying to understand a mother in the grips of a psychotic breakdown. And yet, it is also about every person who has ever loved someone who is being consumed by a force which feels outside of their control. It’s about the fire inside of deeply sensitive and creative people who sometimes succumb to radical instability. It’s about the creative force as a cushion of psychological safety in times of unmanageable duress, and it’s for anyone who has experienced disassociation, numbness, forgetting and hiding as a result of experiences that were just too big and scary for their psyches to handle.
My hope is that as a woman, looking with compassion at many generations of women in my own family, I will be able to tell this story differently than it has ever been told before.
Our script, THE SIBYLANT SISTERS is a fairy tale of the protagonist’s own creation. Caelum, an 8 year old girl, is living with her sister Terra, in circumstances that do not permit her active imagination to stay rooted in its grim, unstable reality. Instead she takes us through a world populated by ogres, gnomes, paper-doll fairy godmothers, magical pegasus guardians, and most importantly, the Wee Witch Katarina, who is most certainly not their mother, no, definitely not, but who nonetheless holds them captive in the dismal realm of The Grey House.
We see Caelum struggle to differentiate her own verdant imagination and blooming intuition from the mental illness, addiction and psychosis of those around her. All this while trying to forestall the looming catastrophic breakdown soon to be brought about by the Wee Witch Katarina.
The film will come to life within my visual world, shifting back and forth between stop motion animation, cell frame animation, and live action with richly detailed costuming and makeup. The set will be built out of the sprawling hoarder’s sheds of my childhood backyard in Florida, mixing my present day language of block printing and immersive installations with the swampy overgrown magic of a long lost Florida.
I’m currently developing the script with screenwriter Meagan Brothers, and working through some of the big creative questions with producer Lisa Muskat.
I’m also developing a language of stop motion animation with human scale puppets that interact with the same world occupied by the actors. I’m prototyping makeup and costuming to define each of the characters. Most importantly I’m studying acting, and developing my process for working with child actors to bring forth the fantastical realism of the Sibylant Sisters’ world.
This is all tremendously new, and yet also feels like a natural continuation of the collaborative work I’ve been doing for the past two decades.
I see this experience as a way to be exposed to people with knowledge and expertise who can help guide some of my raw creative energy, and expose me to the true craft of filmmaking, and ultimately facilitate my vision coming to life.
