Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Created by Lilian Mehrel & Mary Evangelista
Tribeca Film Festival 2019 Section: Immersive, Cinema 360
Screenings
April 26th - May 4th, 2019
Tribeca Festival Hub
Spring Studios 50 Varick Street, NY NY 10013 *Ticketed Venue
A blue-hearted rom-com about people who are going to lose someone they love. Nobody knows what to say. So they fight about nothing, laugh or cry, and dance at the wedding. It's a romantic comedy, after all.
A live-action/animation, stereoscopic 360, blue-hearted rom-com three-in-one “mini-series” about people who know time with their loved one is limited. Nobody knows what to say in the face of a terminal prognosis. Witness the absurd, quotidian, golden moments they have in the face of “waiting”. People get lost in the nonsense of living. What else do you do while you’re waiting?
BASIC INFO: FORMAT: Three-in-one episodic mini-series / short MEDIUM: 360º Immersive Cinema / Live Action with moments of hand-painted Animation RUN TIME: 17:29 CREATED BY: Lilian Mehrel & Mary Evangelista SUPPORT: Tribeca Film Institute, Google Daydream STARRING: Rosa Gilmore STATUS: World Premiere
MORE: Follow several fresh stories of icebergs. By icebergs we mean people. On the surface, you may never guess what they are each going through. This beach is the waiting place. They are not here for no reason. Artful hand-painted animation overlays stereoscopic 360 live-action footage, illustrating emotional subtext and the transformative quality of water - rain, icebergs, a sea of tears. Three episodes are connected by emotional reality, the mythic Goddess of the Sea and the Underworld, a mysterious message in a bottle, and a wedding at the end - it’s a romantic comedy, after all. Break the glass to say goodbye to bad luck.
Film-still and behind-the-scenes images available upon request.
Lilian Mehrel: Co-Creator Lilian Mehrel is an award-winning writer & director who distills the humor and poetics of life into stories. As a Dartmouth Senior Fellow, she wrote and illustrated a hybrid family memoir about her Kurdish-Iranian and Hungarian-Jewish-German family. With a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, she earned her MFA from NYU Tisch Graduate Film. Her work has won awards from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Tribeca Film Institute, Google, ABC/Disney, IFP Marcie Bloom Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Science & Entertainment Exchange / Imagine Science Films NYWIFT, a student BAFTA nomination, and the Nancy Malone Directing Award. She co-created Water Melts with support from the Tribeca Film Institute and Google Daydream Immersive Programs and Lab, premiering at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. She also created one of the first virtual reality narrative films, haunt, which premiered at Tribeca Interactive, was selected for the TFI/Warner Media Immigration Co/lab, and taught New Media Storytelling at NYU Tisch Grad Film. Her comedic writing can also be seen in McSweeney's.
Mary Evangelista: Co-Creator An award-winning filmmaker, Mary Evangelista was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA from NYU Tisch School of the arts for Writing and Directing, where she was the recipient of a prestigious Tisch Graduate Fellowship for Cinematography. In her last year at school, she produced Fish Bones - a feature film which premiered at Slamdance 2018. Her short film, Fran This Summer, an LGBTQ summer love story, has screened in over 20 festivals, including the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. She is the co-creator of Water Melts, a Tribeca Film Institute and Google Daydream supported VR rom-com about people who will lose their loved ones. It will premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. With all her work, she pursues distinct and transformative stories full of bullish heart and levity. She is currently a Directing Fellow in Film Independent’s Project Involve.
I have never wanted to capture life so desperately as this past year - when my beloved, still-young, athletic parent got an out-of-the-blue stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Suddenly, I lived in a liminal space. I lived with a broken heart. I lived in a mind wading into thoughts of death, of losing the person I love most. And yet - we were still alive. Living in hyper-awareness under the threat of loss. I have searched for stories about people living in this liminal space. I have yet to find them. Stories about this don’t exist. They need to exist. We are uniquely positioned as artists and storytellers to share our emotional reality, one that so many share. One that everyone shares in one form or another. We live there with humor. We live in the day-to-day. We watch rom-coms. We write dark comedy. We live in fear. We live in love. My co-creator, Mary, is going through the same with her mother. We came together and realized what stories we both needed to tell. How we hoped to capture some of the surreal feeling of being in this circumstance - how you still deal with quotidian absurdities of life in the face of death, how the pain is impossible to express, how golden moments of togetherness can become larger than life. Have you ever been afraid of losing a loved one? Have you had to face that reality? Do you wish people who looked and felt like you were represented more on screen? Do you like edgy rom-coms? Then WATER MELTS is for you.
REPRESENTATION: Water Melts was created by immigrants and women; Mary is from the Philippines and a vocal member of the LGBTQ community; Ting is from Singapore and China; and Lilian is a Kurdish-Iranian and Hungarian-Jewish daughter of immigrants. Our cast and crew is made up of diverse (and majority women) talents. The stories reflect our experiences, embodied through the characters - an African-American opera-singing Goddess of the Sea and the Underworld inspired by Filipino mythology, a mother and son, a father and daughter, and a romantic couple - two women who end up getting married at the end. It is also a story created by the young daughters of parents with terminal cancer. We want to honor all those in our shoes as well. FORM / FUNCTION: Water Melts uses stereoscopic 360 technology, but it brings an old-school element to the medium in a fresh way. We overlay classic hand-painted animation (created by Emmy-award-winning artist Maya Edelman) on the 3-dimensional live-action footage. The real and the unreal co-existing in this surreal emotional landscape - the way humor and heartbreak can live together too. It is unique in the 360 realm as a narrative-driven piece. It also stands out in its play with genre: a blue-hearted rom-com. We embraced a minimalist naturalism with long takes (the way it might feel to be sitting near a couple on the beach, eavesdropping on their argument) - almost like theater. We wanted the audience to have breathing room to look around and take in the vastness of the beach, to choose to watch the characters or let their conversation wash over you as you follow an animation. We played with cinematic touches in editing, like creating a slow-motion 360 montage. In a way, we already are in the waiting place - from the moment we learn of loss, we know we will most likely have to experience the loss of our loved ones. We try not to sit around and wait, but to live in the in-between. What else can you do? The same holds true for the condensed version, when suddenly you are told it is supposed to happen in the near future.
Tingerine Liu: Producer
A Chinese/Singaporean NYC-based filmmaker, NYU Film MFA graduate, and recipient of the Ang Lee scholarship, Ting produces work with a mischievous sense of humor and a wistful sense of wabi-sabi - the beauty of impermanence. Her films have premiered at the Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival and toured in the international film circuit, including widely in Asia. She produced Water Melts as part of the Tribeca Film Institute and Google Daydream Immersive Programs Lab; it will premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.
Maya Edelman: Animator
An Emmy-award winning animator (Broad City) and illustrator living and working in New York City. She has worked with clients such as New York Times, Pop Sugar, Zagat, UCLA, The Dana Foundation, and Whil Concepts. She has also worked on animated projects for RadioLab, Psyop, Blacklist, Transistor, Mighty Oak, Havas Studio 6, and ODD/NY. She is currently represented as a director of animation at MAJORITY.
Ariel Marx: Composer
An award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist, Ariel has composed for major motion pictures including the Emmy-nominated HBO film The Tale, The Devil Has A Name, To Dust, 10 Things We Should Do Before We Break Up, and #LIKE. Her scores have premiered at Sundance, Tribeca, and SXSW.
Cast Notes: Rosa Gilmore
Rosa Gilmore (Daughter, Water Melts) (Zoe, The Handmaid’s Tale) Currently starring on Amazon's TV series The Expanse as Dr. Lucia. Water Melts was her first 360 piece.
Chivonne Perkins
Chivonne Perkins Accomplished Soprano Opera Singer Performed in David Lang’s Mile Long Opera on the Chelsea Highline, featured in The New York Times. Water Melts was her film debut and first 360 piece.
Created by Lilian Mehrel & Mary Evangelista Produced by Tingerine Liu Starring Chivonne Perkins Erinn Holmes & Elya Yerushalmy Rosa Gilmore & ML Josepher Nikos Koukas & Gergana Mellin Directors Lilian Mehrel & Mary Evangelista Story by Lilian Mehrel & Mary Evangelista Writer Lilian Mehrel Cinematographer Mary Evangelista Animation by Maya Edelman Sound Chapter Four Post-Production Koncept VR Color Company 3 Original Music Ariel Marx
Tribeca Film Institute & Google Daydream
This production was made possible by a generous award from the Tribeca Film Institute's Tribeca Interactive and Google Daydream’s
Immersive Programs and Lab.
This film is dedicated to:
Dory Vergara // Thomas Mehrel and Elahe Mehrel
Lilian Mehrel [email protected] +1 305 586 9569 Mary Evangelista [email protected] +1 510 331 6996 Tingerine Liu [email protected] +1860 685 1106 *Screener appointments, interviews and press images are available upon request. Follow us: #TeamWaterMelts #WaterMelts
@lilianfilm @maryelista
