Private
Life, has begun shooting. The story is a little bit Brokeback Mountain,
a little bit Boys Don't Cry. It's a short film, a fictionalized
re-telling of an actual hate crime the writer/director read about nearly
a decade ago that really terrified him. A gay couple, backpacking
through the Appalachians, was shot at eight times sniper style while
making love in a secluded mountain meadow. Check out his website, tell
all your friends and SHARE it will all your Facebook friends.
>>View Website
The film was written and directed by
Greg Williamson, a grad student at the cinema school at the University
of Southern California in Los Angeles.
In addition to the gay-interest
theme, there is also a huge outdoors theme. Two-thirds of the story
takes place out in the mountains on a backpacking trip. They have been
scouting outdoor locations for months! [He’s really enjoyed being able
to go on so many hikes to scout the locations.]
The film tells the story of a gay
couple, struggling in their relationship, who end up forging a deeper
connection while on a backpacking trip out in the great outdoors.
Private Life is a story about a broken sort of person, who is scared and
trying to hide from the world and how he ultimately learns that only by
opening up and making himself vulnerable can he can truly begin to
heal.
Greg added, “Even after coming out I
spent a lot of time judging others—too gay, too effeminate, too
shallow, too political or just too into escaping their troubles with
drugs and alcohol and drama. Being gay is a large and complicated
conversation and my place within it has never been much more than
tenuous. It wasn’t until I started figuring out what this story means to
me that I felt like I had anything to contribute to the conversation.
To really open myself up to another person makes me feel vulnerable to
them shutting me down, walking away and not returning it. It makes me
feel that what I’m sharing might be judged as offensive or immoral or
wrong or selfish and met with hostility, anger, rage or violence. It
makes me feel vulnerable to feelings of embarrassment and humiliation
and that’s really scary to me. Fear of vulnerability I think is a
universal part of the human experience—a necessary instinct for
survival. But there’s so much more to life than just surviving it.
Making this film is a way to confront my own fears about what it means
to me to come out and be vulnerable.” We will try to put together a
screening in Boston once it’s complete.
