Director’s Statement
First and foremost, I’m so grateful for everyone who helped bring this film to life.
A Place to Fall Down was created as a response to something we all experience: grief. Humanity can be, at its core, a tragic existence. However, even in the face of the strongest adversities, we can find it in ourselves to search for the beauty of it all. After our collective experiences over the last few years, this story of loss, despair, and ultimately, hope – has a common thread through which we’re all connected.
Artistically, I love the short film format. It’s very expressive in ways that full-length features and television can never be. The beauty of a short film is that it can be anything you want it to be. It can be a moment in time. It can be three acts. It can be one!
This means the audience usually has no expectation of what they’re about to see – it’s a blank canvas, and I find that to be extremely exciting. So much of what I’m required to do as a writer and director is find the balance of art and commerce, to find ways to share interesting and meaningful stories in a system that has many, many, many rules. When I have an opportunity to subvert that system in a genuine and thoughtful way, I take it.
The most rewarding part of this journey has been getting to collaborate with such brilliant people. I’ll be forever grateful for every single person who touched this story. I appreciate everything I’ve learned from them, and all the help I’ve received on this journey. I’d like to add an extra special thank you to every person reading this, for taking the time out of your day to watch this film. I hope you enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed creating it.
Sincerely,
Duane Hansen Fernandez
Background & Inspiration
Grief and anxiety have always been a part of my life, and the way I have processed it has been an examination of what it is exactly. Grief is universal; we have all experienced it in various ways. I think most people are familiar with the framework of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Each step in itself makes sense, but what I learned the hard way is that it’s not linear – they almost never happen in that order. There’s no timetable, either. It can last months, years, decades. It never goes away completely. However, in time we all heal, and we can learn to manage our grief through hard work and behavioral techniques. That’s the inspiration behind A PLACE TO FALL DOWN: a lifelong examination of grief and why it hurts so damn much.
Last year, I finished a feature-length screenplay titled A BEAUTIFUL DISASTER. It’s a coming-of-age film that follows a 20-something named MARGO navigating life and love in the modern world. She recently lost her mother, CHARLOTTE, and is now doing everything she can to not lose her father, JOSE. A PLACE TO FALL DOWN actually takes place inside this larger world – it’s a conversation between a father and daughter, and it’s a really emotional moment in the film. In a Beautiful Disaster, this happens from MARGO’s point-of-view, but after finishing the first draft of the feature, I couldn’t stop thinking about this scene and what it reveals about the deep pain of heartache.
We never see the battles people fight, and that is the exact reason this scene stayed with me for so long. From the outside looking in, this is a subtle scene telling a small part of a larger story. But, because of how emotionally raw it is, it became a truly relatable experience. It illustrates the complex nature of life, how life moves on whether we like it or not. We have to continue to show up, to put one foot in front of the other, to do the work.
In this scene, we see a young woman putting her own grief aside for her father, while her father, in the eye of his own storm, continues breathing for his daughter. Each calculated with every word, careful not to put the weight of their pain on each other. In the end, while MARGO understands that her father is hurting, she could never imagine how lost he truly is.
The Princess Mononoke quote at the top of the short eloquently sums up the complexities of life. “Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.”
