Sweetie Pie
After an important invitation arrives, a young woman must try her hand at the brutal sport of pie-making.
The year is 1953, and Francie is so determined to make a perfect pie that she overworks the dough, rendering it all but impossible to work with. When she brings the result of her efforts to a dessert social, it stands in stark contrast to the beautiful pies of other attendees. Francie's response to her pie's poor showing provides the comedic punch, quite literally, to the film.
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Mary Clare PlaschkeDirectorYounger
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Brigitte WilliamsonWriter
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Brigitte WilliamsonProducer
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Leanne VelednitskyProducer
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Chandler WildProducerSigning Off
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All the Way Around ProductionsProducer
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Brigitte WilliamsonKey Cast"Francie"I Know This Much Is True
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Meredyth KenneyKey Cast"Margaret"The Sinner
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Maria RuscheDirector of PhotographyCouples Therapy
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Project Type:Short
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Genres:Short, Satire, Comedy
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Runtime:2 minutes 40 seconds
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Completion Date:March 6, 2020
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Production Budget:5,000 USD
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Country of Origin:United States
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Country of Filming:United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:Yes
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Student Project:No
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Best Shorts Competition
Award of Excellence -
Oregon Short Film FestivalPortland
United States
February 25, 2021
Official Selection
Mary Clare Plaschke is a writer/director based in New York City. Currently, she is a coordinator for the Saturday Night Live Film Unit.
MC focuses on sketch content, branded doc, puppet content, and branded puppet content. Her work has been featured on Splitsider, Vulture, Funny or Die, and WHOHAHA.
Writer's Statement - Brigitte Williamson
Like the pursuit of any art, piemaking is a skill that is developed through brutal trial and error. It’s intuitive and tactile, and the quest for the perfect pie is cruel to novices.
Sweetie Pie is a rumination on this pitiless pursuit, inspired by the parable of the ceramics class put forth by David Bayles and Ted Orland in their book Art and Fear. They describe a ceramics class in which the students are divided into two groups, quality and quantity. The results are such:
~ While the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work, the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. ~
It's a story of the paralysis of perfectionism, and the ineffectual compulsion to work and rework the clay in our hands until it is beyond use. These are experiences known to so many early-career artists who need the courage (and opportunities) to fail on their way up the mountain.