Please sign up for an audition/information session before October 14 or email me at Alicia.mazzurra@yale.edu !
https://calendly.com/short-film/30min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IkijbCLrYg
Why am I doing a scene from Medicine for Melancholy?
I am interested in understanding how we can love across differences and how systems of oppression affect us deeply within our interpersonal relationships, including our relationship with ourself. How history lives in the fabric of our cities, our communities, the land and shapes our interactions. How queer, BIPOC joy & connection—especially that of neurodivergent and autistic folks—is so vitally life-giving.
While Medicine for the Melancholy is set against the backdrop of rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, my short film centers Edgewood Park in the majority-Black neighborhood of Edgewood that I have lived in for the past year. As a Yale student, I represent the ever-present threat of gentrification and of Yale’s continual extraction from New Haven and abuse of Black bodies and labor. As a trans autistic of color, I also see how homelessness and grief greatly affect my community in New Haven and deeply desire spaces of healing, rest, and joy for my people. I feel the precariousness of both our deep need for community and the painful obstacles to that connection.
How do I (potentially) envision these characters?
M is a Black New Haven native who grew up in Edgewood and went to James Hillhouse High school where they were involved in a lot of student protests and walkouts. They have spent their summers skateboarding at Edgewood Skatepark, making music with their friends, and working part-time at Walgreens. They now work full-time as an Amazon driver and recently broke up with their white goth girlfriend and have been posting art, quotes, and political rantings on their old Tumblr ever since. (Totally nothing melodramatic about the breakup.)
Jo is a Tumblr-obsessed Black Yale student dating a white partner. Instead of studying for their econ test, they drunkenly hook up with M after meeting at Partners. Despite their hesitation, they end up spending the day with M, moving across New Haven from NXTHVN to Edgewood Park to Pizza House, sharing laughs and more serious conversations about race, queerness, and New Haven. Jo’s style often reflects various pop culture icons, activists, or Black writers who have been influential to them, especially since they grew up in a majority white suburb.
(Flexible depending on casting and how each actor wants their own identity to show up. Since the scene is fairly nonverbal, this information will not be available to the viewer but rather is part of how I’m thinking about the reimagined scene.)
actors_needed_1.pdf (.pdf - 1.89MB)