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Logline

When a fire takes their home, a father and daughter must find a way to salvage what remains: each other.

Synopsis

A few weeks after a fire has devastated much of her town, Beth drives home from college to help her father Charles in the aftermath of their family home being destroyed. Tensions between them emerge as they embark on the emotional process of assessing the monetary losses of the disaster, revealing not only that they are grieving the loss of their home in opposite ways, but that they also have not fully processed the loss of their mother and wife, a year prior. Will their cumulative loss lead them to lose each other as well, or will Beth and Charles find their way to new growth in the aftermath of trauma?

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Meet the Filmmakers

Katherine Fisher — Director/Producer

Katherine Fisher is an Emmy nominated and Gotham, Peabody, and GLAAD award-winning producer. She has over 15 years of experience producing narrative and documentary films in the U.S., UK, Kenya, and Congo. Her work has been screened at Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival (winner 2018 Special Prize), SXSW (winner 2019 Short Film Jury Award), Miami International Film Festival (winner 2019 Knight Made in MIA Short Film Award), LA Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, among others. Recent credits include the 2019 short film Five Times A Day written by Fawzia Mirza and directed by Tchaiko Omawale, and the 2018 short films Liberty written and directed by Faren Humes, and A True Crime written and directed by Marques Green. Past credits include Ink from writer/director Rosie Haber, and the Emmy nominated series Her Story, directed by Sydney Freeland. Documentary works include One Billion Rising, and the award-winning Netflix Original City of Joy. From 2004-2015 Katherine was the Director of Events for V-Day, the worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls. She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and is a 2018 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow, a 2018 New Orleans Film Society Southern Producers Fellow, and a 2018 20th Century Fox Global Inclusion Fellow. proof of loss is Katherine’s directorial debut.

Laura Zak — Writer/Producer

Laura Zak is the co-founder and creative director of Drinkwater Studios LLC, as well as an Emmy-nominated, Peabody, and Gotham Award-winning writer, actor, and producer. After creating two seasons of the popular webseries #Hashtag in 2014, she went on to create and star in Her Story in 2016, for which she won the 2017 Peabody Futures of Media Award, the 2016 Gotham Award for Breakthrough Series, a 2017 GLAAD Media Award, and was nominated for the 2016 Prime Time Emmy Award for Best Short-Form Comedy or Drama Series. Laura was a writer and actor on the Emmy-winning Amazon series Danger & Eggs as well as on Netflix’s upcoming Twelve Forever, the first series to ever feature an LGBTQ young person as its lead. Laura’s theatrical work can be seen in various films, series, and music videos including Take My Wife, Spunkle, Lesbian Princess, Foxy Trot, and the upcoming Eureka!

Sine Vadstrup Brooker — Director of Photography

Sine Vadstrup Brooker graduated from the National Film School of Denmark, and has already accumulated a list of credits numbering in the dozens, which include projects that have screened at such festivals as South by Southwest, Telluride, TIFF and Cannes Lions. As an undergraduate in film studies, Brooker discovered the work of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, HKSC, and “it was like something clicked,” she recalls. “When I saw Chungking Express, I was really inspired by his poetic camera movement, the colors of light, and the playful subjectivity he used on that film.” Her next stop was the National Film School of Denmark, where she specialized in cinematography — and where her work attracted the attention of ArtOfficial, a Scandinavian agency specializing in representation for behind-the-camera creative talent. Her graduate project, Melon Rainbow, won the Best Cinematography prize at the London Independent Film Awards. She also completed an ASC Master Class in 2015. Since then, Brooker has shot short features, music videos, commercials and several documentaries — as well as Land of Glass, a low-budget feature captured with Arri’s Alexa Mini and Kowa Mirrorscope Anamorphic lenses.

Robert Grigsby Wilson — Editor

Robert Grigsby Wilson’s editing work includes film festival favorites, hit television shows, and viral internet videos. Most recently, Robert’s work was recognized by the 2019 Berlin Film Festival with the world premiere of Goldie. Previously, the 2017 SXSW Film Festival premiered his film Fits And Starts and awarded of the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize to Most Beautiful Island, on which he served as additional editor. His short film The Privates also premiered on Vimeo Staff Picks in July and he also spent the summer of 2017 editing at the Sundance Directors Lab. In 2016, he was part of the editing team on the Emmy-winning and Eddie-nominated TV show Mr. Robot, along with his feature film The American Side completing a nationwide theatrical roadshow tour, and his short film Baby Teeth taking a festival run that included IFFBoston and the Maryland Film Festival. Also recently, Rob was part of the editing teams of Captain Fantastic and Halt And Catch Fire and in 2014 his short film Dig, directed by Toby Halbrooks, screened at the Sundance and SXSW Film Festivals. Other notable work includes David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, music videos for Twenty One Pilots, Yeasayer, and Iron & Wine, the documentary web series Everything Is A Remix, and Miranda July’s A Handy Guide For The Easily Distracted. His work has been nominated for an MTV Video Music Award and featured on Vimeo Staff Picks, Buzzfeed, Boing Boing, and Short Of The Week. Rob has also had the privilege to assist many established editors and is incredibly thankful for their mentorship.

Graham Waleryszak — Executive Producer

Graham Waleryszak is Co-Founder of Drinkwater Studios with his sister Laura Zak. As a master mason with a reputation for successfully managing high budget, custom artistic construction projects, Graham has the ability to bring diverse groups of people together and accomplish big picture goals. With his educational background in English and Social Science, blended with a vast knowledge of the building trades and finance, Graham has the rare ability to straddle a large swath of the socioeconomic spectrum, in a wide variety of geographic locations and serve as an ambassador between the worlds. This unique network creates an extremely diverse and powerful base that serves as foundational strength to all artistic endeavors Graham puts his support behind. Graham invented the Choco Taco when he was only 12.

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Contact

For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.