My editor and I put together a first rough edit, it needs the voice over with a script to make sense. At the moment it’s just a succession of very nice visuals but it needs some guidance to understand the story behind them.
I posted an ad in a few Facebook filming groups and found Zoë Grisedale-Sherry. She is a writer/director/producer and runs her own indie production company: https://www.grisedalesherryproductions.com/. It aims to champion womxn in the film industry. We got on quite well and worked together in a few edits of the script.
Vicky has asked me a few times why I don’t write it myself, as it’s my idea and I know what needs to be said. I don’t feel comfortable writing for some reason, I find it extremely difficult to put my ideas down into words. I think I feel more comfortable letting someone doing it for me.
Looking for speculative fiction stories using ecofeminism values, I was highly inspired by the dystopian novel “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler (1993). Butler introduces a near-future dystopia in which society has collapsed due to climate change. It unfolds through the journal entries of Lauren Oya Olamina, its protagonist, who lives with her family in one of the walled neighborhoods, and is equipping herself to survive in the future.
The visionary sci-fi author envisaged an alternate future that foresaw many aspects of life today. She extrapolated her vision of a near-future dystopia from what she read in the news, forecasting what kind of collapse might result if the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered.
I was inspired by various aspects of this novel when writing the script of my film. I liked the way she speculated about a potential future after an imminent ecological collapse, what does society look like in this future? Society has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty, and mixed-race relationships are stigmatized amid attacks against religious and ethnic minorities. Resource scarcity is something I am looking into for my film too. How can we manufacture materials from already existing ones, without extracting them from nature?
I found it interesting that the reader knows the story from a first-person perspective. This way of narration makes the audience empathize more with the storyfrom the beginning.
