Who's Gonna Take Care of Me?

"Who's Gonna Take Care of Me?" Is a film inspired by the heart-wrenching events that happened in my dear mother's ordinary life from 1991-2000. The names have been changed. "A Beautiful Mind," "The Elephant Man," and "The Sixth Sense."
Winner: Best Drama Feature

One foggy day in January of 1991, with two white suitcases in her swollen fists, chain-smoking schizophrenic Marie Banister hitchhikes from Ventura, California to Portland, Oregon in the wind and rain and disappears. In her psychotic state of mind, Marie changes her identity to K.P. Dzwain and believes herself to be a wealthy woman from England. She endures two years in Portland, Oregon and six years in Seattle, Washington as a homeless street person living in shelters and panhandling for a living while battling schizophrenia, breast cancer, and a deadly brain lymphoma. After nearly nine, dark, grueling, and discombobulated years she is finally found through Missing Persons and brought home to safety by her daughter, actress, singer, and mystic, Lynne Banister.

One catastrophic rainy night in December of 1999, still homeless and ridden with cancer, a malnourished, delirious, and incapacitated Marie prowls through a parking lot in Seattle, Washington and is hit by a car. When the driver of the car gets out to help her notices a massive, circular, size of a man's wallet, tumor jutting out from her forehead just above her left eye. The Good Samaritan rushes Marie to Memorial Hospital where she is forced to be admitted as a lock-down patient at the mental health facility because she is a high-flight risk with a saga of homelessness. Marie's life is in grave danger as the hospital staff begins a frantic search through the Missing Person's computer database to locate her next-of-kin. As Marie undergoes a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy in an attempt to rid her diseased body of the deadly cancers, the hospital staff locates Marie's daughter, Lynne who is living in California and working as a singer and an astrologer.

In an utter state of shock, Lynne flies immediately from Los Angeles to Seattle and appears in court to obtain legal guardianship of Marie, to make her medical decisions for her and to bring her home to safety to care for her for the rest of her life. It's a tearful mother-daughter reunion as Lynne holds her fragile, homeless, mentally ill mother, who has been believed to be dead, and who's been missing eight years, in her arms. In May of 2000, Marie who has been to hell on earth and back, flies home to safety without her left breast, with a bald head, no eyelashes, half-blind, and luckily minus the massive tumor on her forehead. Marie Banister finds the answer to her lifetime question, "Who's Gonna Take Care of Me?" She is a true victor of one of life's most barbaric battles, and now she's a cancer-free heroine.

"Who's Gonna Take Care of Me?" written by, award-winning entertainment industry veteran, Marneen L. Fields is a high quality, character-driven, woman's survival story. At its core, it's a profound love story of faithfulness and courage between a very special mother and a compassionate daughter who are destined to share with the world their mystical revelations and renewed faith in God's miracles.