Swimming While Drowning
Two houseless, queer teens are able to see each other in a world that would rather they disappear.
Director’s Statement
Queerness is an ever changing experiment exploring what is possible in a world free from categorization. I create to defy normative expectations and challenge the possibilities of our collective existence through the most widely consumed medium in the world today. In 2017, I saw the play “Swimming While Drowning” and was in awe at the simple but stunning way it spoke to my own queer experience as well as experiences in my community that I did not share. This year, I am ready to take on the directing of this complex project and do justice to a beautiful story.
Swimming While Drowning will expose the infinite dualities of queer life: how queer people hold within themselves a balancing of joy and suffering; self-love and self-hate; beauty and pain; light and darkness; sacred existence and inconsequentialism. Throughout the film, the two main characters, Angelo and Mila, struggle to reconcile these competing forces in themselves and with each other. This duality will be visually explored by juxtaposing raw sections of hyperrealism in the shelter room with the abstract fluidity of poetry readings. Ultimately, the film asks: how are we as queer folx able to swim and drown in the same lifetime, together?
If we as queer people expect society to stop defining the parameters of our existence, then I believe the style or our filmmaking should reflect that deviation from norms that is central to the queer experience. I want to make films devoid of expectation and filled with the energy that comes from a limitless future.
-Pearson Kunz
SYNOPSIS
When teenager Angelo Mendez decides to leave his home out of fear of further disappointing his homophobic father, he encounters a world he was not prepared for at an LGBT homeless shelter. There he meets a fellow homeless teen who gives him a voice and unexpectedly introduces him to love. Angelo ultimately learns that all relationships, no matter how powerful, have an unfortunate time cap which he must cope with through his writing. A dark romantic comedy set in a homeless shelter. A story that is simultaneously gritty, sweet, funny, heartbreaking and real.
