Location & Community

Shot on location in our community-- a beautiful and historic neighborhood in East Los Angeles where modest late 1800's homes sit atop overgrown hilltops that look out across the lavish high rises and skyscrapers of modern Downtown LA-- this film, at it's heart, is a story of duality; both in community as well as personally and internally.

The movie deals heavily with themes of mental illness and instability, with characters who are struggling to balance multiple conflicting facets of their personalites and navigate the ever changing highs and lows of life. And the city of LA-- one of the most culturally and economically diverse in the country--serves as the perfect backdrop to showcase this dichotomy. This movie is a love letter to the city as much as it is a harsh criticism of the pain that it can harbor.

Deeper Themes

Contained between the layers of this film is an abstract examination of masculinity and the ways in which societal pressures and expectations can manifest within someone to influence thoughts and behavior. Tony is a sensitive person who considers himself progressive and yet he is still hyper masculine in a traditional sense. He struggles to reconcile the way he sees himself and the way he wants to be with the behaviors he has been conditioned to believe are expected of him. But he finds comfort in Mara's openness and acceptance of his sensitivity. As she disarms him with her earnestness he begins to open up more and embrace his more feminine traits— traits that he has felt less comfortable expressing in the past. But as the relationship starts to fizzle out Tony is jolted by the shift in power, and much to his own surprise, he is triggered into modes of aggression by a loss of control. For as much as he attempts to change and grow, Tony often finds himself reverting back to old ways when he feels cornered or defeated.

Synopsis

Between the Moon and You is a hallucinatory and abstract exploration of internal struggle and conflict in personal relationships; not an attempt to provide all of the answers or explanation, but rather to engage an audience by asking questions that challenge the viewer to examine their own lives and actions and engage with them thoughtfully.

The movie almost acts as two films in one. The first half is a sweet and poetic romance-- a clear tribute to classic films of the French New Wave; and the second half is a dark comedy/psychological thriller-- a spiralling decent into madness.

Think: Breathless meets Taxi Driver

Before Sunrise meets the Silence of the Lambs

The Story

Mara and Tony are a young couple of struggling artists living in Los Angeles. As we watch the two get to know each other and fall in love-- almost in real-time --through a series of dates and conversations, the two slowly begin to reveal deeper and more dynamic aspects of their personalities. Tony is struggling to hold himself together after the recent loss of his grandmother. He's working on fixing up the house he inherited from her while losing himself in isolation and digging deep into nostalgia and reminiscing, often searching for meaning in old photos and home movies.  Mara is an actress who is struggling to adjust to the ebb and flow of life in LA. She is searching for consistency in her life through her close personal connections but having a hard time balancing her relationship and her career, which requires long hours and frequent travel. As the two begin to open up further, their differences begin to surface and their relationship slowly begins to unravel. 

The couple eventually break up and Tony spirals quickly into isolation and despair. Struggling to pick up the pieces of his failed relationship and figure out what went wrong, he begins to focus obsessively on all of the things that bother him about his life in the city. The longer Tony isolates himself, the more agitated he becomes, eventually begining to confront strangers in the street and laying out rules and guidelines of how he thinks people should behave. When Tony wakes up in bed one morning to find that his pet dog has died in his sleep next to him, it's the final straw that pushes him over the edge into hopelessness. Tony begins to examine all of his friendships and comes to the conclusion that they are petty and superficial. Desperate to take control of some aspect of his life, he devises an evil plan to exact revenge. Tony invites all of his aquaintances to a party at his house and lures a few of them into a makeshift cage that he has built in his basement. He begins to torture them but is quickly interupted by Mara, who has grown concerned about Tony and has come to check on his wellbeing. As Mara makes an effort to remind her estranged lover of the beauty and love that is possible in the world, Tony makes one final assesssment of who he believes is really to blame for his troubles, finally blaming himself.