A Whistle in the Dark.

Over Dinner is a short drama/comedy focusing on the rocky relationship between a quirky grandmother, Eleanor, her grown up daughter, Anne, and her grandson James. Taking place almost entirely within the confines of Eleanor's tiny apartment over the course of one Thanksgiving dinner, the story centers on the tension between Anne's inability to let go of the past and Eleanor's willingness to forget. Anne is frustrated by her role as James's strict single-mother, while Eleanor has the freedom to shower her grandson in special attention, the kind Anne was denied growing up herself in a single-parent household. Eleanor sees this differently, and instead remembers the eccentric and humorous ways in which she tried to distract Anne from the harsher realities of her childhood.

This comes to a head when Eleanor presents James with an exorbitant present, ignoring Anne's wishes to return the gift, and pitting mother against son. Anne then sees it as her mission to get Eleanor to accept blame for Anne's unhappiness, and to lift up the mask of loving grandmother.

Her actions bring the both of them down to a child-like level and the curtains come down, all for James to see. 

Origins

The film is inspired by the relationship of writer and director Travis Gonzalez's mother and grandmother. He would sit at the adult table and listen to them discuss family drama and arguments, prompted by what seemed, from the perspective of a child, something as simple as overcooked food.

His grandmother, a single parent of five sons and one daughter, depended on his mother to be the secondary voice of authority. That's a lot of responsibility for a child, and serves as the basis from which the short film was written.

Artistically, we want to place serious family issues (lies, verbal abuse, favoritism, poverty), within the frame of childlike exaggeration and immaturity. Unlike the tried-and-true image of a dysfunctional family unit, placed in their three bedroom, 2.5 bath house in the suburbs, the film's characters exist in the world of people struggling to stay above the poverty line, and remain loving while doing so. These econmic tensions become a factor in the small family's happiness, and is the root of Anne's frustrations from childhood into motherhood.

The love and bond of a grandmother and grandson also comes into contention with the love needed of a mother. Anne, the mother in this story, is placed in the outside circle of her own small remaining family of three. The person of authority within her household, she resents her own mother for her ability to evolve into a warm and loving grandmother, where she has taken over the role of pessimist.  Anne and Eleanor, in their dependence on each other, extends beyond the trope of the feuding mother and daughter in their equitable relationship. The film highlights the dissappointment Anne feels in discovering her mother has always been less of a figure of authority and more like a sister. 

Over Dinner pulls cinematic inspiration from the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, especially Momma Roma and Bellissima, which played with the changing image and concept of mother and child in film and its connection to an increasingly materialistic world. It challenges the use of material objects as a balm for pain, and challenges the ways people mask tpain in order to move forward, and how that can lead to further damage. 

Director's Statement

As a filmmaker and a senior Film & Media Studies major at Yale University, Over Dinner is both the most personal film I have worked on to-date, as well as the culmination of my work in film within university. I've always been inspired, and somewhat terrified, by my eccentric family and their past, and one of my goals has been to create a film based on their relationships. 

By shooting this as a fiction film as opposed to a documentary, I will be able to specifically highlight the universality of family dysfunction, damaged childhoods, and repressed memories. My film takes eccentric and larger-than-life characters, and grounds them within a world of realism. 

Cinema should be a space where you can enter a world completely different than your own, but still be guided by an uncanny sense of familiarity. While Over Dinner, is based around my experiences, it will pull on feelings of insecurity people feel in their own families. I want to walk the line between what is funny, what is serious, and how humor can be a way of coping with sadness. 

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We hope you will join our small family as we work to bring Anne, Eleanor, and James' story to life!