COLD TURKEY is a short film that uses strong visuals to explore the nature of addiction, and the cycles that the disease can trap a someone in.

After listening to an old message his wife left him, Al, an alcoholic decides to quit drinking. However, when faced with what made him start drinking in the first place, along with withdrawals, he finds that maintaining his sobriety isn't as easy as he thought.

I always tell people that my love for cinema truly began when I was ten years old when my dad showed me the Lord of the Rings Trilogy for the first time. I had enjoyed movies before, but no story had captured my emotions and imagination way those films did. As I continuously watched them again and again, I realized that so much of those movies were spent chronicling the deterioration of its protagonist.

As I got older, I began to get more and more obsessed with films that did this, which led me to directors like Scosese, Fellini, and more recently, Sean Baker. I’m fascinated by stories that follow people trying and failing to keep themselves together as their worlds spiral out of their control. I think many of us are able to empathize with these types of stories more, because we are able to see ourselves in them.

As much as I loved these films, it wasn’t until my own issue with substance abuse that I realized what I could add to that style of filmmaking. Addiction has been portrayed fairly authentically before, however one critical aspect of that cycle I had never seen is the part of the addict that genuinely wants to get better, but doesn’t know how. Ask any addict in the world how many times they tried to stop drinking or using before they were actually able to, most answers' would be in the hundreds, yet this experience is seldom shown. In reality, being drunk or high is the easy part. It's when having to face the physical and emotional lows of sobriety  without the help they need that people fall apart. This project is more than just a film, it is a statement that hopefully destroys the stigma that addiction has anything to do with willpower. I also want to show anyone who has suffered, or is currently suffering the way Al has in the film to know that it doesn’t have to be that way.

While we are striving to portray the disease of alcoholism authentically, the goal of the film is not totraumatize or exhauast the audience. There will moments of dark visual comedy organically sprinkled throughout the film that give the film some necessary levity. Much of the film is without dialogue, so physicality and by extension, physical comedy is a huge aspect to making the film work. In my experience, it is uniquely theraputic to either talk about, or in this case, viscerally demonstrate the lengths and struggles an addict will go to either use or not use. There is a catharsis in being able to simply sit back and laugh at the antics Al gets himself in.

I knew I needed a distinct visual style to capture Al’s journey properly. The first decision I made to do this was to shoot the film in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Keeping this space small was only natural as it makes Al feel trapped within the frame, while isolating him from the rest of the world. This was also done to put the viewer  in the same headspace as Al, as when someone is going through the same withdrawal symptoms as him, the rest of the world disappears.

Of course, the visual language doesn't end with the bars on the side of the frame. When looking for inspiraton to capture a feeling of lonliness, I discovered the artwork of Edward Hopper. As soon as I did, I knew I had found the look that I was looking for. All his paintings have a unique look, but not one that ever feels overbearing to the point that the emotion of the piece is lost. More importantly, he has such a unique ability to capture loneliness in his paintings that when I looked at them, I could just as easily see Al in them.

We hope to raise $6,500 through an audience on seed and spark that is hopefully as passionate about bringing this project to life as we are. This will cover the minimum production costs. Prinicpal photogrophy will take place from July 9th-14th in Los Angeles, CA. 

Please consider donating or sharing this project on social media, so we can expand our outreach, so that anyone who sees this film is struggling, or knows someone who is struggling the way Al is, they can get the help they need.