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Flares

In a remote Alaskan village, Leni masks the symptoms of a mysterious, debilitating illness in order to get her life back.

synopsis

At the end of a two-and-a-half mile tunnel in the midst of the Alaskan wild is a town where everyone lives in a single, high-rise apartment building. A former military outpost, it has become its own microcosm – equipped with a post office, a grocery store, and a church. The elevators are the town square, the hallways its playground, and when a pipe clogs on the eighth floor, the entire town feels it for days. This interconnectedness and isolation make it all the more difficult for 42-year-old Leni, to hide the fact that her body is playing strange tricks on her. Oliver, her 8-year-old son believes her to be possessed by the Samoan spirit of Ma’i Aitu who lives in the body of Kevin, the rescued moose calf that sleeps on their couch. But Mabel, Leni’s mother, is convinced Leni’s just fallen off the wagon again. Meanwhile the rest of the residents, like Natak and Margie, live out their private lives on top and beside one another, sometimes in public and sometimes in the solitude of their own un-lived thoughts as the salmon migrate further north, threatening the livelihood of everyone.

Director’statement

While developing my first feature, my partner had a stroke. She was 33. The surreality of it never quite left me. It was as if her body had become someone else, someone neither of us knew. She eventually recovered and returned to work, but something had shifted. There was the constant fear of being discovered by clients, a slight slurring of speech, anything that might give away the fact that her faculties, once permanently rooted in her being, had left her, and could leave her again. "Flares" is the story of this uncertainty and the dangerous lengths one might go to in order to conceal their limits, prove their capacities, and preserve a sense of self despite the whims of an unmanageable physicality. I have chosen a town in Alaska where everyone lives in one building because under these circumstances it is hard to hide a diagnosis. Through different characters I explore the misperceptions, and social burdens that arise from living with a diagnosis and the ways in which we all “mask” the symptoms of the things that ail us at the cost of discovering a deeper interconnectedness.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2020
Discover more details here:
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TFL Catalogue 2020

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