The film “The Passing Season,” much of it shot in Little Compton, premieres this week at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
First screening will be Wednesday, Aug. 10, at 8:30 p.m. …
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The film “The Passing Season,” much of it shot in Little Compton, premieres this week at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
First screening will be Wednesday, Aug. 10, at 8:30 p.m. at the Jamestown Art Center, 18 Valley St., Jamestown.
The event marks a homecoming for director Gabriel Long who will be moving back to his home state from Brooklyn, NY, that week with his new wife Rebecca Atwood, the film’s producer.
Little Compton and ice hockey — two things near and dear to Mr. Long’s heart, play key parts in the movie.
"At 28, Sam Alden gets told that his professional hockey career is over," writes co-producer Bruce Mason of the plot of Mr. Long's planned film "The Passing Season."
"At a loss, he returns to his hometown, reconnects with a group of high school buddies, and tries to escape into an earlier, simpler time in his life. But recapturing youth turns out to be more complicated than Sam imagined, and he finds that the harder he pushes away the realities of adulthood, the more complicated his life becomes."
Filming began in the summer of 2015 and back then Mr. Long said he could think of no better place to shoot than his home town.
"The film is very much about Sam's relationship to his hometown and, as a low budget film, we want to take advantage of Little Compton's beauty as much as possible. A large portion of the film is going to be shot at my parents' (Abby Brooks and Nicholas Long) house" on Taylor Lane," he says.
"There's a fair amount of driving around in the film, so we want to use the back roads of Little Compton, and even just the fields, people's back yards, I feel like there's a unique vibe to Little Compton almost wherever you go, so we want to capture that."
The hockey part comes naturally. Mr. Long grew up playing youth hockey with the Newport Whalers program, then at Moses Brown, club hockey in college at Cornell, and then "bounced around between a few Canadian junior teams and finally wound up playing for the Boston Harbor Wolves in the EJHL."
The reality, though, "is that those feelings are about being young, and being in the place where they happened isn't going to bring them back. That’s something I’ve struggled with, and it’s what Sam struggles with in the film … The story really grew out of my experience and the experiences of guys I know who got to their late twenties, had their identities hitched to one thing, often a job or a relationship, and then had a crisis of faith when that thing fell apart."
Mr. Long directed Danielle Brooks & Uzo Aduba’s music video “Jolly Christmas Medley.” Other writing/directing credits include: In No Place (a short documentary about Guantanamo detainees and the civil rights movement), and The Drawing (a narrative short that played at NewFest, Inside Out Film Fest, and on PBS). He was a recipient of the Cinereach Film Fellowship.
Ms. Atwood Rebecca has spent the last decade as a producer and talent manager in New York
Writer Matthew-Lee Erlbach is a writer on Showtime’s “Masters of Sex” and wrote and starred in the one man show Handbook for an American Revolutionary.”
The film stars Tony nominee Brian J. Smith (Sense8, Quantico, The Glass Managerie - Broadway), Gayle Rankin (Cabaret - Broadway, The Meyerowitz Stories ), Patrick Murney, Elizabeth Alderfer and Nick Choksi.