Hello world!

Our first blog entry. Very exciting.

There is a lot to catch up on.

Beneath Contempt is an Emerson thesis film by writer/director Ben Brewer and cinematographer Shant Ergenian. It will be shot from this coming May to the beginning of October on 16mm film.

This blog will act as a live record of our process from the initial stages of pre-production to the final stages of festivals and so forth.

If we accomplish what we set out to do, hopefully these posts will help guide future filmmakers as they attempt to take on their own ambitious ventures. If we fail, well, you’ll know exactly where we went wrong…

So what is our film about?

It’s about the truth!

More specifically, it tells the story of a young man who goes to prison for killing his closest friends in a drunk driving accident. The film takes place during the first weeks of the young man’s parole, after six difficult years spent in a Massachusetts state prison.

It is through this story that our film asks some very difficult questions:

Is it possible to forgive someone who has caused such a tremendous tragedy? Can a community treat a person with respect when they see him as a murderer?

Our film is in a world not of ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’, but of loss and penance, of anger and grief, of great guilt and the blindness of love, of misguided youth and empty homes, of foolish criminals and their mistakes, of people who pray to forget rather than forgive.

We want to make a film that demonstrates something honest about who we are and how we exist together.

…Wow that sounds quite ambitious…hopefully we can pull it off

Thus begins our journey!

Here’s to Beneath Contempt!

-Ben