Cinema and reality blur with comic deconstruction when Lana’s movie falls through the ceiling into her life.
Directed by
Alex Zajicek
Alex Zajicek, born and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has always been interested in telling stories. Ever since he got his first video camera, he has been making short films, and when he got his first computer, he quickly taught himself to animate. He attended California College of the Arts to learn about filmmaking. Shortly thereafter, he began his career as a freelance filmmaker in the SF Bay Area film industry, and that’s where he has been ever since. As a filmmaker, he loves both animation and film, and tries to play with and poke the edges of both mediums in his work.
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I love when filmmakers play with what cinema can do, and that’s what I tried do with this film. I wanted to have jokes come not only from the dialogue, but from the camera, the framing, the editing, etc. The main character, Lana, has been stuck in my head for a while, so I’m excited to finally bring her to life. I have spent a lot of time editing school lectures myself, and Lana is something of a projection of what would happen to me if I got stuck doing for too long. Ultimately, my films are about having fun with the medium, with a bit of satire peppered in along the way.
50-something Louise is a native of West Oakland, California; a community once known as the Harlem of the West, and which gave birth to the Black Panther Party. Gentrification has turned her beloved community into unfriendly and unrecognizable territory and the weight of being Black in America now threatens to crush her. She straps on the daily armor of alcohol, cigarettes and a sharp tongue to block out the constant ache of losing everything that ever mattered. On this day however, a door she has been banging on for years magically opens, an ancestor arrives to help and Louise battles her demons – and herself – in a desperate attempt to find the courage to walk the difficult path toward redemption.
Runtime: 34:15 min
