About the Film & Experience
EMERGENCE OF HEART: a short film is an experience designed to open up intimate and personal conversations across America about the shared roots of the climate crisis and systemic oppression. Emergence of Heart: a short film is a fictional, coming-of-age short designed to prompt audiences to share their own stories and feelings of being alive amidst these social and ecological crises. Through traveling and documenting audience stories, the project will weave individual experiences together to reveal our collective Emergence of Heart.
Behind the Scenes Video
Hear how the filmmakers wove the themes of emergence, community, and sustainability into the making of the film. This behind the scenes film is documents three of the four film shoots (Summer, Fall, and Winter), which feature the young actors telling the first half of the film’s story. The final filming took place in Spring 2023 and captured the young adult and second half of the story.
Synopsis
In Emergence of Heart: a short film we enter the world of Bea, a young white gender curious child, discovering friendship and societal belonging. But when she receives a stuffed sloth for her birthday, her self-exploration comes to a halt as she learns that the natural world is being destroyed by society. Through a captivating storyline, we witness Bea, innerly tormented and unpacking the layers of society’s violent history, continually putting herself aside in her quest to save the world. But in the days before college graduation, as she grapples with how best to change the world does she begin to reckon with her own individuality within a violent society. The film is a powerful exploration of love and self in relationship with the whole. It is a modern, coming-of-age tale of personal and collective reckoning around climate collapse, environmental destruction, societal inequities, and our human existence.