Tomorrow
How will we think of yesterday when it becomes our tomorrow?
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Karis CampbellDirector
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Karis CampbellWriter
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Paul HowardProducerA Pebble in the Pond, Ann Asks Documentary Series
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Kate NorbyKey Cast"Heroine"Mad Men, The Mentalist, Boston Public,
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Karis CampbellKey Cast"Mother"The West Wing, Battle Creek, Rizzoli & Isles, ER
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Project Type:Short
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Runtime:6 minutes 42 seconds
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Completion Date:October 25, 2018
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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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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
From a very young age, Karis possessed the spirit of a performer, bringing her keen abilities to the dinner table as she would dynamically recount the events of her school day in the form of little vignettes; amusing her family with a variety of impressions and her colorful retelling of the events of the day. As she matured into a young adult artist, her commitment to telling evocative and thoughtful stories evolved.
Karis' father surprised her with tickets, on her 17th birthday, to see the original Broadway production of Angels in America. Perched on the edge of her seat throughout the performance, she was mesmerized by the abundant talent that graced the stage and found the brilliant words of Tony Kushner absolutely riveting.
That experience helped shape her as an artist as it illuminated the undeniable power of art to not only entertain, but to also ignite dialogue, educate, and inspire.
This newfound awareness helped inform her identity as a storyteller and it would ultimately define the trajectory of her career.
Classically trained in London and New York, Karis has spent the past two decades working as an actor on stage, as well as in film and television. Best known for her two-season, recurring role on the acclaimed series, The West Wing, she has also been fortunate to have other opportunities on the big and small screens in a variety of other guest-starring roles.
After over two decades of breathing life into other artists' visions, Karis is now leaning into powerful opportunities to tell rich and evocative stories as a budding filmmaker.
She is thrilled to be expanding her artistic horizons with her first foray into writing and directing, and she looks forward to future opportunities to collaborate with her inspiring peers.
In our modern culture we have grown to rely quite heavily on our 'perceptions' to define our truths. We surmise a conclusion when given only rough sketches of things, and we make these assumptions, which are strictly based on our own biases, to validate our world views and help us feel secure. Though I am sure that this is a fundamental function of being human, something that has likely always been so to some extent, I trust that with the prominence of social media, the myth-making machine, this has become more pronounced and is now so normalized in our contemporary culture that most of us fall prey to it on a daily basis.
As we are continuously faced with heavily edited and filtered narratives, we have become immune to how our perceptions alone are the keys to how we navigate our modern world.
As a mother I am trying very hard to teach my children how to see the world through a compassionate lens and to be careful not to 'judge a book by its cover'.
The spirit of this expression illustrating how one can miss the potential of a situation, person, place or thing, by unfairly judging it based on its outward appearances. It teaches us to not assume the worst. What struck me, however, as the core of this story took shape was that these same snap judgments and under-supported narratives may also be responsible for lulling us into a false sense of security.
My intention with this film was two-fold. First and foremost, the story is deeply personal to me and my producing partner, inspired by true events and I felt compelled to share it because I maintain that there is undeniable power in bringing to light issues that typically lurk in darkness so that we may create a path to healing and transformation.
The second intention was to explore the theme of perception, as I mentioned above. We are inclined as humans to take bits and pieces of information, stitch them together, and then attach ourselves to those well-crafted narratives, convinced that they are indisputable truths.
I was blindsided by my own well-crafted narrative built around the circumstances that inspired this film and I wanted to attempt to recreate my own crushing journey as a sort of cautionary tale.
My hope with this film is that it may open the eyes of our viewers and quiet their minds long enough to process a deeper awareness of how each of us filters information and how generating unsupported narratives can lead us down dangerous paths.
May 'Tomorrow' inspire audiences to look closer and examine their individual measures of reality and explore how we all participate in perpetuating falsehoods when we neglect to see past a facade.