Genre
Synopsis
Queer underground video artist RAY (27, any ethnicity, edgy Aubrey Plaza vibes) returns to London to premiere her latest work, a searing treatise on the ‘cult of motherhood’.
Hip, confident and successful, Ray is at the top of her game career-wise, though seemingly less so in her personal life. When Ray phones her wife LAUREN (30, any ethnicity, trophy wife a la Kristen Stewart) back in Los Angeles, she discovers that Lauren has reacted to Ray’s ambivalence around their impending motherhood by hooking up with her intern.
Ray has decided against inviting her attention-seeking (and long-estranged) mother ANNIE (47, white working class, artsy, narcissistic Toni Collette type) to the screening, but Annie shows up anyway and is horrified to find that Ray’s film includes voice-over taken directly from Annie’s abusive emails to her daughter.
After a dramatic public showdown, Annie storms out and, whilst Ray is partying with her friends, Annie is seriously injured in a car accident. Ray is already at the airport when she hears the news. Riddled with guilt and the fear that this may be her last chance to resolve her troubled relationship with Annie, Ray puts her personal life on hold and reluctantly heads back to her childhood home in the rundown seaside town she left a decade before.
As Ray struggles to care for her increasingly difficult mother, she learns to accept the woman she could previously only approach through her art. And as Ray reconciles her past she is able to resolve things with Lauren, and commit to the future she has built for herself on her own terms.
Bio
Kanchi Wichmann is a British/ German filmmaker based in Los Angeles since 2022.
Her debut feature BREAK MY FALL (UK 2011) was released theatrically in Germany and the UK and sold to over 20 territories worldwide. It was the first British lesbian feature to gain a UK cinema release and is on the BFI list of 10 best lesbian films. Kanchi was also named on the 2012 After Ellen list ’50 directors Hollywood should be hiring’. A brand new directors cut of Break My Fall; BREAK MY FALL REDUX was released online in fall 2023.
Kanchi’s 10-episode comedy web series, MIXED MESSAGES (DE 2017) is released online by London-based Peccadillo Pictures. Kanchi has also made several short films and written for film and LGBTQ* publications including Another Gaze (London) and Siegessäulle (Berlin). She was the directing recipient of the FilmNetzwerk Berlin mentoring programme 2021/22 (Mentor - Kerstin Polte) and was on the UDK artist development program (Berlin) 2021 with her series pilot entitled Adults of Berlin.
She has participated in screenwriting programs/ residencies including Hothouse (London), Babylon Europe (London/ Cannes) and most recently at the Vermont Studio Center (2023/ USA). Her feature script GROWING UP IN PUBLIC was a semi-finalist in the Table Read my Screenplay competition (Sundance 2023 and Hollywood 2023) and quarter-finalist in Emerging Screenwriters (2024). Kanchi is a BAFTA US Newcomer screenwriting fellow.
