A Boy a Man and a Kite

Director's Statement

The film is inspired by true events and the lives of two men - victim and perpetrator. They are both alive today. The film opens and closes with a red kite flying fearlessly and joyfully in the wind. It's a metaphor for freedom and represents both the protagonist’s present as the kits is battered and buffeted by the wind and his future as it’s allowed to soar upwards. We use an abstract visual form to tell is very painful story. The film blends two time periods where we meet our protagonist Daniel and our antagonist Trevor at two different ages. As the piece progresses we see the balance of social power shift in favor of Daniel, who finds a form of salvation in his music and refuses to succumb to the descendency so common in victims of abuse. However the shame starts to eat at him and he finds himself dying. Eaten from within by the secret. At the heart of the story is the concept of injustice and shame and a hypothesis that in silence there is a benign conspiracy to avoid difficult subjects. In the film we visit moments of love, panic, confusion, ignorance, mental and emotional impotence. My approach to this film is to tell a raw difficult story through the eyes of a young man who has no idea what’s happening, and no idea that what is happening is wrong. I want to grasp in the actions and voice of this young man the righteous indignation that I feel as I think of his inability to manage a circumstance beyond his control. I want to tell this in a poetic way so as also to pay tribute to the fact that the real life person, on who this is based, managed to rise above his secrets and create a life that was creative and fruitful. On a human level I have a direct connection to the subject matter and was present during times when Stephen - the real Daniel - was closest to death without ever knowing that he was hiding this terrible dark secret inside of him. Stephen maintains that it was this secret that created the cancer, which began to eat him from the inside out. This film tells a painful story that ultimately ends in joy and redemption and freedom from the shackles of an internal prison, in which our lead character, finds himself. The film illustrates that injustice is something that occurs in many incarnations and that silence is a form of benign conspiracy. Instinctively I am naturally attracted to dark subject matter. I am also at my most personally indignant state in the face of injustice. As a writer, director, producer, father, son, and as someone who’s experienced an abusive episode myself, this film has many layers that are attractive to me as a storyteller.