Logline: A desperate Brooklyn filmmaker humiliates herself as she attempts to make a poignant documentary about an island that sank 100 years ago off the coast of her Mississippi hometown.
Director's Statement: We are three best friends who love to make movies about our real experiences, analyzing, and more often than not, making fun of our own interpersonal dynamics and anxieties. In all of our films, we cast our friends and family members, and THE ISLE OF CAPRICE follows in this tradition. Courtney and Jake will play versions of themselves alongside Courtney’s mom, Kim, and Kim’s friends, Southern women in their 60s (“the real geniuses of language,” as Courtney says in the film), who will tell stories from their lives in their own words.
The idea for the film was inspired by Courtney’s very real infatuation with the Isle of Caprice – an Island off the coast of her Mississippi hometown that was home to a bustling casino during the Prohibition era. The island sank 100 years ago, and after learning about its existence, Courtney became obsessed with making a “poignant documentary” about the island’s history and the personal histories of the women that raised her. Simply put, she failed to do this, and the embarrassment of that failure opened up a new way of imagining the film as a meta-narrative comedy about creative failure and the impulse to mine one’s past for “authenticity.”
With this film – our first feature – we are excited to return to the same setting and community where we made one of our favorite projects, KIM BUSH’S ABDUCTION, a comedic short which stars Courtney and her sister as they juggle hosting a Christmas party while trying to track down their mother, who they fear has been kidnapped.
Synopsis: Best friends and filmmaking partners Courtney and Jake arrive in Courtney’s hometown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a “free vacation,” aka taking care of Courtney’s mom’s tiny dogs while Courtney’s mom, Kim, goes to Croatia to explore her recently discovered (and maybe not real) Croatian heritage. However, Courtney and Jake’s plans for a relaxing week away from New York and the pressures of their own creative ambitions are abruptly abandoned when Courtney becomes captivated by the story of the Isle of Caprice, a sunken island in the Gulf where there was once a prohibition-era casino, and decides it would be the perfect subject for a film…
Jake is reluctant to indulge this idea, which he worries is pretentious and boring, but Courtney is insistent – the film could be brilliant, a hybrid documentary capturing the unique history the Gulf Coast, its shifting, unstable landscape, and the hidden stories of the Southern women who raised her, e.g., the story of being a Marlboro “cigarette girl” in the 70s and burying excess stock in a neighbor’s backyard, being spirited away to New Zealand to live with a professional crop duster, celebrity encounters, and near-death experiences.
While Courtney throws herself into work on a grant application, Jake scrolls Instagram and sees that one of their most successful friends from New York, Michelle, is working on a film shoot in nearby New Orleans and invites her to visit them for the weekend. Courtney is resentful, feeling Jake is trying to distance himself from her esoteric project (which he is), but when Michelle arrives and hears about Courtney’s idea, she’s completely enthralled and eager to be involved.
The next day, the three set out to gather “visuals” for the grant application, taking a ferry to a nearby barrier island where they hope to catch a glimpse of the area where what’s left of the Isle of Caprice lies just below the surface… On their island excursion and throughout the film, they also encounter Courtney’s aunts and her mother’s friends, hearing the stories that Courtney aspires to somehow capture in her film.
When the ferry ride turns out to be disappointing – there is nothing to see of the island, just the flat horizon of the Gulf – the friends make their way to a local museum to view “artifacts” from the Isle of Caprice, which turn out to be just the same photos available on Wikipedia blown up onto poster boards from CVS. Courtney was hoping for forks, plates, haunting relics of the past, the wreck of the Titanic, basically… She calls her mother and accuses her of misleading her about the Isle of Caprice.
There’s nothing to make a film about, nothing to show her fancy producer in New York, and Courtney worries she has no ideas, no real life, that she’s a “fake person.” There’s no such thing as a fake person, her mother tells her, and if you don’t have anything to make a movie about, then don’t make a movie.
Courtney, Jake, and Michelle return to the house disappointed, but are met with a bit of good news: It turns out that the tiny dogs, who have seemingly refused to eat for the entire trip, leading Courtney to fear they will begin having seizures and need to be taken to an emergency vet in the terrifying neighboring town of Wiggins, have actually just been going next door and eating cat food from the neighbors every day.
Then, just before bed, something incredible happens: Courtney is finally sent a legendary, long-lost video, one she’s been asking about all over town and talking up to Jake for years, a grainy cell phone video from nearly 20 years ago that shows her mother’s friend Leslie getting kicked by a zebra.
*Project is a spiritual successor to the Vimeo Staff Pick & distributed by Oscilloscope Films: https://vimeo.com/376431250
Style & References: Scripted for story beats and structure, but open for improvisation of the real people telling their real stories, in their own words.
The simple shooting style, humor, and improvisational quality of CRYSTAL FAIRY, with its cast made up of actors and filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s real-life family members. We’re also inspired by the mother-daughter dynamics and self-referential nature of Lena Dunham’s TINY FURNITURE, as well as the exploration of place and use of non-actors in Sean Baker’s THE FLORIDA PROJECT.
