"Regret" is written, produced, and directed by women and features women in lead roles. A successful middle-aged lesbian is beloved and feared in her rural community. Instead of small town ignorance or nostalgic values, Regret reveals the diversity and complicated relationships in these communities.

 

 

 

 

 

In 'Regret," a middle-aged woman, Mamzelle, can look back on her life with pride. She is a successful self-made farmer--thriving even as Big Ag drives more and more of her small-town colleagues off their land--and an enthusiastic contributor to the social well-being of her neighbors. As an out lesbian, Mamzelle is alienated from many of her neighbors, but she continues to care for her fellow townsfolk, many of whom are worse-off, refusing to exploit those who sell their produce or even their farmland to her.  Morever, she tries to offer employment to those who are struggling. Though Mamzelle has a loving and stable, if long-distance, relationship, even that is challenged when a young woman whom Mamzelle has known since her childhood turns to her old friend for help. Mamzelle is then forced to reckon with what her life path has meant, what she has acheived, and what she has sacrificed.

 

"Regret" examines the lives of under-represented people and small-town communities in non-stereotypical ways. In rural America, farmers often must compete with industrial agriculture to maintain their livelihoods;  people of color and LBGTQ+ suffer from prejudice but stay and love their communities; and motherhood is complicated by unrecognized burdens and joys.

 

 

 

Bringing the stories of Kate Chopin to life in film has been a rewarding and challenging experience. Our previous projects have been featured in film festivals such as the New Orleans Film Festival, Vero Beach Wine and Film Festival, and Women Over Fifty Film Festival. Our script "Desiree's Baby" was a finalist for the #createlouisiana narrative film grant in 2017. "Regret," our fourth project in the series, promises to be our most ambitious. Set in Cajun country, the film will explore our rural communities, the economic difficulties they face, and the tensions between members of different classes, races, and identities.

 

Chopin's nineteenth-century stories examined the ways that gender, social status, race, and cultural identity defined an individual's freedom, intensified and echoed in the limitations imposed by society. We have sought to stay true to these difficult issues in our films, even as we underscore their contemporary relevance, whether portraying through metaphor the sexual coming of age for a young woman in "Ripe Figs"--

 

 

--or the deadly consequences of the choices a woman makes to survive in a world hostile to her independence, as in "Dr. Chevalier's Lie."

 

 

 

The world was often a harsh place for women and people of color in Chopin's time. But in writing about those issues, sometimes subtly and often against the grain of contemporary beliefs, Chopin also helped to ameliorate those attitudes, heralding many of the transformations in notions of gender and race that we take for granted a hundred years later. But we still have a long way to go. In our modern adaptation of "Regret," we examine how prejudice continues to create limits--and impose suffering. We also hope that our films will continue to make the changes encouraged by Chopin's perceptive tales. 

 

 

 

Our company, Ripe Figs, has already produced several adaptations of Chopin's remarkable stories, including "A Respectable Woman," "Ripe Figs," and "Dr. Chevalier's Lie." We are pleased that "Ripe Figs" and "Dr. Chevalier's Lie" can now be seen in film festivals all over the country.