PALM TREES AND POWER LINES

17-years old Lea spends her summer break aimlessly tanning in her backyard with her best friend, tiptoeing around her needy mother, and getting stoned with a group of boys from school. This monotony is interrupted by a chance encounter with Tom, an older man who promises an alternative to Lea’s unsatisfying adolescent life. But as things progress between them, red flags about Tom’s life begin to surface, and Lea chooses to ignore them. Under Tom’s influence, Lea begins to see her mom as unfit and her friends as a waste of her time. Isolated from those around her, Lea discovers Tom’s true intentions and finds herself in a situation that she never could have imagined.

“I know that occasionally people make shorts that they are purposely making in order to act as a proof of concept so that they can make that feature or something like that. For me, when I went to make this short I was just trying to explore some of my experiences of loneliness and insecurity as a teenager growing up in suburbia. But even as I was making the short, and honestly, immediately after it premiered, I just felt like I haven’t even touched on half of the stuff I wanted to explore here. So I began adapting it – and call it an adaptation rather than an extension, because as you probably noticed, it’s quite different in scope, although it’s set in the same world and a similar character.”

DIRECTOR: Jamie Dack. SCREENPLAY: Jamie Dack, Audrey Findlay. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Chananun Chotrungroj. FILM EDITING: Christopher Radcliff. PRODUCTION DESIGN: Yu-Hsuan Chen. COSTUME DESIGN: Aaron Crosby. CAST: Lily McInerny, Gretchen Mol, Jonathan Tucker, Quinn Frankel, Armani Jackson, Timothy Taratchila, Rhied De Castro. PRODUCERS: Leah Chen Baker, Jamie Dack.