Directed by Jeremiah Zagar StarringEvan Rosado, Isaiah Kristian
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Directed by Jeremiah Zagar Starring Evan Rosado, Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Gabriel Raúl Castillo & Sheila Vand SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL SCREENINGS Saturday, Jan. 20th at 12:00pm - Library Center Theatre - World Premiere *Sunday, Jan. 21st at 1:00pm - Holiday Village, Cinema 4 - P&I* Monday, Jan. 22nd at 9:00am - The Ray Wednesday, Jan. 24th at 6:00pm. - Salt Lake City Library Theatre Thursday, Jan. 25th at 1:00pm - Redstone Cinema 2 Friday, Jan. 26th at 3:00pm - Sundance Mountain Resort Screening Room Saturday, January 27th at 2:30pm - Egyptian Theatre 2017 / 90 mins. / Drama / USA / Color / English Publicity Contacts Sales Contacts PMK•BNC Cinetic Media Omar Gonzales/ [email protected] John Sloss / [email protected] Sara Sampson/ [email protected] Eric Sloss / [email protected] 212.373.6120 212.204.7979 LOGLINE Us three, us brothers, us kings. Manny, Joel and Jonah tear their way through childhood and push against the volatile love of their parents. As Manny and Joel grow into versions of their father and Ma dreams of escape, Jonah, the youngest, embraces an imagined world all his own. SYNOPSIS Us three. Us brothers. Us kings, inseparable. Three boys tear through their rural New York hometown, in the midst of their young parents’ volatile love that makes and unmakes the family many times over. While Manny and Joel grow into versions of their loving and unpredictable father, Ma seeks to keep her youngest, Jonah, in the cocoon of home. More sensitive and conscious than his older siblings, Jonah increasingly embraces an imagined world all his own. With a screenplay by Dan Kitrosser and Jeremiah Zagar based on the celebrated Justin Torres We the Animals novel, is a visceral coming-of-age story propelled by layered performances from its astounding cast – including three talented, young first-time actors - and stunning animated sequences which bring Jonah’s torn inner world to life. Drawing from his documentary background, director Jeremiah Zagar creates an immersive portrait of working class family life and brotherhood. About WE THE ANIMALS In September 2011, author JUSTIN TORRES published a novel based around his personal experiences We The Animals growing up in upstate New York. Titled , the book features three young boys, their Puerto Rican father and Italian-Irish mother, who began the family when they were teenagers, as was the case in his own family. It contains “All the hard facts of my life,” says the author, “but the incidents of the book are invention. I had wanted to write about a childhood similar to my own, and the slow, gradual process of individuation, of coming into your own.” Meanwhile, from 2002-2008, documentary filmmaker and editor JEREMIAH ZAGAR was developing a film about his own family – his mother and his father, a renowned and quirky mosaic artist in Zagar’s In a Dream, native Philadelphia. The result was the produced by a childhood friend of Zagar’s, JEREMY YACHES. The film went on to premiere at SXSW before being picked up by HBO and launched The Square Jeremiah into a robust documentary career. In 2012, Zagar lent his editing eye to (Sundance Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, 2013), and went on to direct a documentary for HBO, which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. As his documentary efforts were taking off, Zagar was looking for a narrative film to craft, something he had always been driven to create. One afternoon, Jeremiah popped into McNally Jackson, a bookstore on Prince Street in Soho (where, We The Animals incidentally, Torres had worked a few years prior). Zagar spotted in the “We Recommend” display on the counter. “I picked it up,” he recalls, “and read the first page, and the first words of the book were ‘We wanted more.’ It was a mindblowing first page. I read the whole book right there in the store cafe. It just grabbed me. I thought, ‘I have to make this into a movie.’” Zagar reached out to Torres. Justin had already heard from other producers expressing interest, but, the author notes, “They were all very vague. Most of it was ‘I want to buy the rights to this.’ Nobody said ‘I want to make a film out of this book, and here’s how we’re going to do it’ – until Jeremiah.” The two met at a bar and sat outside. “He just talked about the book, and he talked about it with real intelligence and depth,” continues Torres. “Jeremiah is smart about art and the aesthetic world. I could tell he knew In a what he was doing and had passion and motivation to do something great.” Notes Zagar, “Justin saw Dream We The Animals , and could see the similarities to : a brutal love of family and expression. So there was a kinship right away.” To craft the screenplay, Zagar turned to Dan Kitrosser, a longtime friend and playwright. As Kitrosser recalled, “[Jeremiah] told me about the scene at the lake, about this boy who was drowning, and then he swam. There was something really cathartic for him about that image.” The two began working on writing – even several months before signing the deal with Torres’s publisher – out of Zagar’s apartment on the Lower East Side. They continued for nearly four years, meeting two or three days a week, having lunches for four or five hours or walking around, having coffee and talking. “Dan’s a great partner for me. I’m more of a myopic thinker, and he’s more of a global thinker with tons of ideas,” Zagar relates. The director would often expound on his visual interpretations of the story on their walks, after which, Kitrosser says, “It would be my job to put that into nuts and bolts words on a page that you could read and conjure that image yourself.” Kitrosser also brought key elements of his personal experience to the writing , says Zagar. “Dan is gay, and I’m not. And it was very important for us to make sure that the gay perspective was authentic.” Kitrosser could easily relate to the story’s protagonist. “That was something that spoke to me from the very beginning,” he recalls. “I remember, as a kid, being so aware of everybody’s bodies constantly, and what I shouldn’t look at and what I should. That was something very tied to my sexuality, and something that was really palpable in the book.” Their adaptation was, as Zagar puts it, “a screen translation, not a rewrite of the book. We wanted to remain as true to the book as possible, while making sure it was applicable to the screen.” “A lot of the dialogue is from the book,” says Torres, “but there are also things people in my life would have said. It was uncanny to watch.” There were a few important modifications, the most notable of which was keeping the protagonist at a young age throughout the story, rather than following him until he’s a teenager. The protagonist is also given a name, Jonah, in the film, whereas in the book he is an unnamed narrator, a quiet observer soaking in much more than he can handle, Torres notes. Once the script had reached a solid stage, Zagar, Yaches and Kitrosser participated in the IFP [Independent Film Labs] in September 2013 and the SUNDANCE INSTITUTE Writers Lab the following year. “They really helped us figure out and synthesize what we really wanted,” Zagar says. The creative advisers also made an important suggestion, Kitrosser says. “One of the notes we got at Sundance was that they wanted to feel the difference between the boys. When we started, we wrote Jonah as the watcher, and all three boys were essentially the same. Their lines were interchangeable, because we were writing them as a unit.” As a result of the labs, Jonah and his siblings, became quite distinct. Not long after, CINEREACH, with producers ANDREW GOLDMAN and PAUL MEZEY, came aboard to produce the project. “Andrew and Paul are really amazing with narratives,” Zagar says. Adds Yaches, “They brought so much to the process. They held our hands through the whole thing and were deeply involved..” Rounding out the production team was CHRISTINA D. KING, who first started working with Zagar and Yaches in 2006, by helping launch In A Dream at SXSW. King brought production experience in narrative film and scripted television to the largely non-fiction team. Finding a Family Casting began in 2014, with the search for the three boys taking the longest, spanning a full 18 months. NOELLE GENTILE, an acting teacher in the Albany area who helped with casting, and was the boy’s acting coach during production, describes the challenge the team faced. “It’s one thing to find one young person who just nails it,” she says, “but to find three boys who look like they could be brothers, have the chemistry and characteristics of each of those characters, and are the appropriate height and age, made it complicated.” The production originally saw young professional actors, but quickly realized that would not work. Says Zagar, “The most important thing was that they needed to be real kids. We weren’t asking somebody to be somebody they weren’t. We were casting young people who were comfortable in their own skin and who were really already almost the characters that we needed them to be, and who had something ineffable.” Casting associate MARLENA SKROBE was “resourceful and tenacious,” King says. “She set up any and every auditions at schools, going to Latino and Puerto Rican Day parade or community group, Police Athletic Leagues’ summer programs – trying to pinpoint any kids that just had that magic in them.” Most of the scouting took place in New York City and surrounding boroughs, though eventually the search moved north, to the town of Amsterdam, which has a high Latino population.