WHY DIG WHEN YOU CAN PLUCK Writer/Director/Editor
Black and White / 6K / 2024 Narrative, 51 min
WORLD PREMIERE — BAFICI In Competition: Avant-Garde and Genre Section
A filmmaker seeking inspiration for her next movie brings her volatile husband and defiant young son camping on the Oregon coast. When her competing desires to be a good mother and creative artist come to a hilt, she reaches a painful but powerful breakthrough.
“Cambria Matlow’s film dares to whisper storms…Stealthy, precise… and with true empathy in the design of its characters.” - BAFICI
CAST
Sol Marina Crespo as SPRING Patrick D. Green as CLAY Mateo Taylor as ELIO
CREW
Writer/Director: Cambria Matlow
Producers: Fran Bittakis, Sarah Perez, Cambria Matlow Director of Photography: Ben Bach Assistant Director: Kate Beacom, María Moreno Script Supervisor: Aileen Sheedy, Marc Ripper Production Designer: Jeffrey Stillwell Set Design PA: L Quezada, Morgan Webb First Assistant Camera: Kanon Havens, Anda Arroway, Chris Diana-Peebles Second Assistant Camera: Marcie Caddell Gaffer: Haley McCoy Sound Recordist: Dicky Dahl Hair, Makeup & Wardrobe: Angela Foster Second Assistant Director: Aaron Peipert Production Assistants: Dora ‘DJ’ Schaller, Imani Garnett, Roshan Gurung, Karli Gray, Lianna Perry Fountain, Rictor Riolo
Editor: Cambria Matlow Additional Editor: Marc Ripper Original Score: Mel Guérison Dialogue & Sound Editor: Troy Micheau Sound Design: Troy Micheau Additional Sound Design: Mel Guérison Sound Mix: Troy Micheau Colorist: Marc Ripper Title Design: Ben Bach DCP: KC Touschner
Casting Director: Rachel Mossey Casting Associate: Kate Beacom
Production Coordinator: Sarah Perez Associate Producers: RaShaunda Brooks, Chelsea Unsbee Intimacy Coordinator: Kristen Knittle
Catering: Joop Joop Creative Production Insurance: Desert Island Studios
With Support From: Desert Island Studios, Kickstarter, Koerner Camera, Gearhead Grip & Electric, Oregon Film Pathways, Outside the Frame, Picture This, RACC (Regional Arts & Culture Council), Weeble Mountain Casting
SYNOPSIS
Spring, Clay and Elio are a family of three on a summer camping trip to the Oregon coast, where jarring rock formations cut across the horizon. In search of inspiration for a new project, filmmaker Spring takes pictures of the landscape and uses her volatile husband and defiant young son as reluctant props. Otherwise she experiences her family as an unwelcome interruption to her creative process.
Clay and 9-year old Elio sit for hours on the sand reading and snacking, silently enduring their vacation. Lonely and stoned, Spring craves adventure. She jumps in the water and climbs the rocks, alone. But when Elio wants to play with her, she's busy working. Clay grows aggravated with the growing distance he feels from his wife, while Spring is repulsed by Clay’s drinking and aggressive behavior. Elio refuses to wear shorts. They are three ships passing in the night, their messed-up dynamics echoing the solitary seastacks.
On the final day of their trip, a harrowing moment between father and son shatters Spring’s illusions and brings her competing desires to be a good mother and creative artist to a hilt. Her heart breaks as she comes to terms with the choices she’s willing to make and realizes she’s not the mother or the artist she thought she was.
Moving between deadpan realism, unexpected humor and quiet devastation, WHY DIG WHEN YOU CAN PLUCK challenges norms around motherhood and artmaking while exploring themes of trust, violence, and love.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
WHY DIG? As a mother and filmmaker this is a deeply personal film – the main character Spring comes from the guts of my lived experiences in these two roles. Becoming a parent eleven years ago both made me whole and broke me into pieces. Society is not kind to female hyphenates, and we’re told we can’t possibly be good at both mothering and artmaking. We’re told that being a mother means other people get to decide what is and isn’t true about you. I wanted to tell a story that speaks the truth and opens the doors of permission for the next mother to speak hers.
The sometimes sweet, sometimes fucked up dynamics between Spring, Clay and Elio lie at the story’s heart. Each member of the family constantly negates the other’s desires, and they both do and don’t see how they cause each other pain. The imperfect family portrait painted here dares audiences to judge the characters’ humanity. What does it mean to be a good mother? Where is the line on drawing artistic inspiration from our families? I needed to make a film with a mother/artist at its center to ask these questions, and to understand that the answers were not as simple as social norms may suggest.
In watching this film audiences are liable to see themselves in each of the characters’ strengths and flaws. I want mothers especially to be shaken by the family dynamics shown, and because of Spring’s perfectly imperfect humanity, remember their own wholeness in turn, and feel less alone.
REVIEWS
"With it's proud running time of 51 minutes for a fiction, WDWYCP proposes a first anomaly. But this is unusual cinema not only because of it's length: Cambria Matlow's film dares to whisper storms, be clamorously discrete. Disenchanted and uncomfortable, stealthy, precise in the progression of millimetric displeasures that affect its protagonists and with true empathy in the design of its characters, it is especially generous: nothing is kept or hidden to offer a last-minute coup de grâce. It can be a fierce comedy about family dynamics — on which it drops a merciless gaze — but it is also a horror film (with the same theme as its igneous core). " -- Written by BAFICI Artistic Director Javier Porta Fouz and programmer David Obarrio