Logline.

FLOWERCHILD is the story of Anna, a young girl beginning her life in the occasionally hazardous late Sixties in Northern California. Anna’s eventual search for her father, who is living as an expat in Northern Portugal, results in a voyage of self-discovery during which she unearths the mysteries of the past and reconciles with this brilliant, isolated man. Based on real lives.

FLOWERCHILD pre-production teaser

The Story.

FLOWERCHILD is the story of Anna, a young girl growing up in California during the late Sixties, without a father and with a single unconventional mother. Her childish perceptions of the adults surrounding her as they experiment with alternative lifestyles, open relationships and drugs, leads Anna to experience many seemingly adult situations, that force her to grow up quickly. She comes away from her short-lived youth with a curiosity about an aspect of life that she missed... knowing her father.

At twenty, Anna embarks on her search and after a series of misadventures, she finds her father, Martin, living as an expatriate, ex-journalist, in a small village in Northern Portugal. Here she learns some of the secrets of her background and forms a unique but essential bond with this brilliant, emotionally and physically crippled, bitter Renaissance man.

Director’s Inspiration.

I come from a family of artists; musicians, fine artists, writers, and it is this background that has formed my foundation and love for the arts. It was a matriarchy, really. My mother, still-a-hippie and fine artist, grandmother, a cellist and self-proclaimed cultural vulture, and my great-grandmother a concert pianist. Through photography, or filmmaking, or teaching writing and developing screenplays, all of my artistic endeavors led me to writing and directing films that emanate from my history and occasionally present creative muse.

I never truly knew my father, also a writer. It is the story of finding him and finding part of myself in him that led me to tell the story of FLOWERCHILD.

The film explores themes of family; the dissipation of the nuclear family and what it means to redefine and identify oneself in the world without the seemingly essential foundation of a unified family; the universal themes of time and place and how we are formed within those environments and periods; the inherent need to know where we come from; the places and people that lure us and what we take from them, and equally important, what we choose to leave behind.

I plan to emulate in tone, and visual style of films such as BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, TIMBUKTU, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, MY LIFE AS A DOG and LADYBIRD.

Donation Gifts.

In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply.

You move along because life itself moves and you can’t stop it.

— Jim Harrison

Thank you for exploring.