Sweet Old World

Short Synopsis

Combining narrative and documentary storytelling, Sweet Old World tells the story of sixteen-year-old Ethan Hinkle,who is living in the cloud of grief that has enveloped his family since the tragic death of his brother eight years earlier. When his brother’s best friend returns after disappearing in the wake of that tragedy, hidden secrets and unhealed wounds are dragged to the surface, with surprising results.

Description/Treatment

How do you live with the unlivable?

At the age of 36, Jack Kerouac wrote, “For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face.” The book was Visions of Gerard, which he called “My best most serious sad and true book.” It was a memoir of his older brother Gerard, who died when Jack was only four years old. Thirty-two years since Gerard died, the deep wounds left by his short life and painful death had only grown with the passage of time.

My son Michael died on August 9, 1986. His death was sudden and incomprehensible. He was nine years old. His younger brother Danny was seven. I was a thirty-six year old photographer, and for two years after Michael’s death I could only photograph trash–the abandoned remnants of pastlives.

I have now been a documentary filmmaker for the past fifteen years. My second film, The Band, was set during Danny’s junior year in high school in 1996. It was both the story of his life and world centered around his high school marching band, and of our relationship nine years after Michael’s death.

Twelve years later, The Band is the foundation for my current project. This year I received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the development and production of Sweet Old World, an experimental film combining a narrative and documentary story. The genesis of this film is the painful fact that the conclusion I draw at the end of The Band was, I have since learned, profoundly wrong.

After spending a year with Danny in his high school world, I ask at the end of that film why Michael’s death, which will never leave me, has to “tower over” Danny as well. “I know that I’ll never see a precocious nine-year-old without my heart freezing for a moment,” I explain, “But Danny’s life was just getting started then. Maybe in a way these things (both Michael’s death and his mother’s and my divorce–DZ) should fade from his memory, and let him go” (emphasis added).

Three years later, Danny had a mild breakdown while in college. The loss and grief that he had bottled up inside since Michael’s death finally became unbearable. With therapy, he came to understand how much his whole being had been shaped by the loss of his brother, and his inability to know and feel that loss. In essence, Michael’s death had frozen Danny as a scared, lonely seven-year-old.

Danny gave me the book, The Empty Room–Surviving the Loss of a Brother or Sister at Any Age by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, whose brother was the famous “Boy in the Bubble.”Through that book, and discussions with Danny, I have learned how deeply the loss of a sibling is buried in our society, and how my assumption that it would “fade from his memory” is rooted in that. My conclusion in The Band reflected my own reality, not Danny’s. It was an expression of the response heard time and time again by people who have lost a sibling that “It must have been horrible for your parents.”

Sweet Old World has been germinating since then. It tells the fictional story of a father (Brian)and teenage son (Ethan) whose lives were shattered when the son’s brother was killed in an accident seven years earlier. Both trapped in their own private grief and pain, their relationship has grown strained and cold over the years. The return of the dead son’s best friend, who had left town with his family after the accident, causes Brian and Ethan’s carefully constructed protective shells to shatter–bringing them both to the brink of disaster and the potential for a new life and relationship.

Throughout, the story is driven by Ethan, whose new found,and seemingly uncharacteristic willingness to flirt with danger under the influence of his brother’s friend forces Brian to confront his own buried grief.

That story will be told in the midst of a typical year in the life of the South Pasadena High School Marching Band, as a hundreddisparate teenagers and their teachers start from scratch to mold a complex program of music and motion. We will film the narrative story with actors who become part of the band and live through that experience while their story unfolds.

There are two reasons for approaching the film this way. A large portion of my documentary work has been in high schools, and I have learned through filming both The Band andSenior Year that only by taking teenagers’ lives at face value and listening to them without judgment or preconceptions can you truly depict their world. And it is in that deeply real context that I want the narrative story of Sweet Old World to unfold. Every story, even the most tragic, happens in the midst of the mundane, repetitive world of “real life,” and I find a particular elegance to weaving the unique story of Ethan and Brian with the yearly struggle of teenagers in a marching band to create something beautiful.

South Pasadena High School is also an ideal setting for this story. A middle class suburb of Los Angeles, it concentrates the explosion of diversity that now characterizes so much of urban American life. Thirty percent of the student body is Asian, from a wide range of countries, and several nationalities now populate what was once an almost exclusively white community and school. It places Ethan and Brian’s story very much in the heart of the twenty-first century.

This is a new and exciting approach to filmmaking, largely made possible by digital technology. For many years I have been a fan and student of the new realism in narrative filmmaking, starting for me with Jim McKay’s 1999 film Our Song, which he also set in the context of a marching band (Brooklyn’s Jackie Robinson Steppers). The Dardenne Brothers in Belgium have been a tremendous inspiration because of their transition from documentary to narrative filmmaking utilizing the best of documentary. In the American independent film world I have been influenced by the recent films of Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy)and Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart and Chop Shop).

For Sweet Old World Ihope to infuse those influences with my own unique experience as a documentary filmmaker. The Band, my most personal and “narrative” documentary, captured a moment in time that has long since passed. But the parameters of that moment were, as I have gone into here, far deeper and psychologically complex than I was seeing. Approaching the psychological and emotional conflicts that I want to explore in Sweet Old World requires the freedom afforded by narrative storytelling–the freedom to, in essence, take my characters in new directions. With this hybrid approach, the multiple layers of that moment in time can be given a physical expression and explored more deeply (and creatively) than I have been able to with past documentaries.

This project affords me the opportunity to return to the story that, in essence, started me on my filmmaking journey–and to explore it with new insights, depth and complexity. I also believe that I couldn’t have pursued this course earlier in my career,that it has taken the work in documentary storytelling to prepare me for it.