After making her Sundance debut in the Midnight Short Program with the short narrative Prime, also her first film as a director, Meagan Coyle says she still eats meat and she still feels bad about it. Prime is a deliciously sardonic comedy about how ethical consumption is defined, the privilege of those who champion its practice and who actually gets to decide what is environmentally ethical to eat. Grieving after her mother’s violent death, an environmentally conscious Claire decides to go off the grid to join an idyllic farm collective in upstate New York.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Coyle, who had worked extensively as a makeup artist for many productions, explained the genesis for Prime. “So I’ve been on a lot of sets, and there was this one movie that I was working on that, for some reason, there were lots of vegetarians— like, more vegetarians than meat eaters,” she recalled. “When it came time for lunch, the vegetarian pile was huge, and there also were many meat boxes, and someone had said, ‘Oh, is this your meat box? And I was like, yeah, and all of a sudden I got really defensive, and sort of like, well, ‘I don’t eat meat all the time, and, you know, I try to make sure that it’s, like, farm-raised and ethically sourced.’ Coyle added that she thought more about why she became more defensive.I’ve actually tried to be vegetarian before, and I just like meat. I feel good when I eat meat, and it’s hard ethically with so many different aspects of the meat industry, and feeling kind of guilty about it.”
Her thoughts eventually came together with Prime. To handle the subject matter which certainly fit the creative brief of the short program’s midnight theme, Coyle asked the actors to play it “totally straight, and to treat it very seriously.” She explained, “I think that aided in serving the short a lot more than, if we played it more wacky, which you definitely could.” Indeed, reading the script on its own would concoct more bizarrely comedic vibes, but then the cinematography (Joshua Echevarria) grounds the credibility of the idyllic far portrayed in Prime.
The short film offers, forgive the pun, food for thinking about the challenges of becoming an ethical consumer when it comes to food. It can be easier for those who are well-heeled economically, or are in a privileged position. But what about those who would love to do it (especially if they live in an area that is characterized as a food desert), but they don’t have the necessary means to carry through on it?
Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
When it came to casting for the film, Coyle already had known actor Anita Durst for a long time when she worked as a makeup artist. They had clicked together right away early on and when Coyle wrote the role of Rhea, who is the charismatic leader of the utopian farm community featured in Prime, she had Durst in mind. As for the remainder of the casting, which included actor Katie Mumford taking on the role of Claire, Coyle said her first experience as a director casting actors for a film went smoothly.
“Honestly, I was so touched and so honored that they would take that time, and we had so many good readings,” she added. “I could see that they got the humor there, and that they treated it seriously.” Also notable is the score by Brooklyn-based composer Yan Pavelchuk, which includes, at one point, sounds of a Russian chorus.
Coyle revised the script relentlessly, with 60 draft versions. “You know, it’s also in the shorts game, you want to make it you want to make it short, you know? What’s the expression? I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one,” she explained. The good part of it is that Coyle has a bag full of index cards with the beats written out as well as all of the cuts that were made during editing (courtesy of veteran editor Mike O’Brien)—and some of that material might return in a feature-length version of Prime, which Coyle has in mind.
Perfect for this short program: From Peru, ¡PIKA!, directed by Alex Fischman Cárdenas, is an appropriately weird riff on the line ‘I wish I was never born,’ which might be uttered after an unbearably frustrating and painful day. As Lucas, José Medina is brilliant in conveying the devastating anxiety of his character. The film was built into a nightmare that ratchets up quickly and expands upon an earlier script by Trout Cohen about a man who has such a severe itch on his chest that he needs a specially prescribed cream to ease the discomfort.
Noting that the script began as a writing project when he was a film student at New York University, Cohen described how it eventually ballooned into a project that both he and the director believed they now had the means to realize its creative potential. “However, through all that time, one thing refused to fade: the image of a man viciously scratching himself, desperate for relief. That image stayed lodged in both my mind and Alex’s, and soon we began talking it through again, until a thread emerged that suddenly made the whole story snap into place,” Cohen wrote. “From there I sat down to write, reshaping the original themes of comfort, guilt, and anxiety to fit this new odyssey we’d built together.”
The sextet of films in the Midnight Short Program checked all of the boxes on the creative brief. The Worm by Tom Noakes is a surreal comedy about a young man’s outlandish belief that brings about a family intervention. This short joins six other films from Australia that are represented in Sundance this year.
Taga by Jill Marie Sachs effectively extends the creature horror genre with a bristling critique ricocheting back on those who believe their eco-tourism volunteer efforts are for the good of the area and the people in the affected community. Vivi, a third-culture Filipina American, travels to the Philippines to reconnect with her roots but dangers ensue when the group ignores the warnings from those living in the remote landscape.
Homemade Gatorade by Carter Amelia Davis, an independent animator based in Minneapolis, is a well-executed off-kilter and dark comedy with the astute zeitgeist that encapsulates our social media and sociopolitical landscape with undeniable accuracy. The starting premise of trying to offload a homemade creamy surplus of homemade Gatorade sets everything in motion. One can be easily hooked on Davis’ idiosyncratic visual style which makes the viewer laugh even when they wonder whether or not they actually should do so.
Um by Nieto fits the Midnight bill to a T, with its over-the-top psychedelic sensations. Nieto describes himself as a French Colombian perversionist artist who has been persecuted by animal defenders and Hare Krishnas. Um would be an accurate assertion of the creator. The short is set in dystopian chaos, as the eggs of the bird people are haunted by demonic visages. The short is based on the work of Daïchi Mori, with whom Nieto has developed a collaborative artistic relationship. In an interview, Mori said about the relationship, “At the beginning I didn’t want to exhibit my work, I thought my art was just for me, something intimate that nobody has to see (as with my face), but he insisted so much that finally my grandmother convinced me to do it. He also made a short animation movie, using my rolls, it’s not bad, it’s called, Swallow the Universe.”