artwork by Symin Adive
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There is no world where mom won’t cry during the intervention.
It’s fucking tense, dude! Like the night before a battle but the person you have to battle is your own daughter. You want to vomit. You want to call it off. You want to institutionalize a family member. And it all has to be done in an hour and half.
Intervention is about a family coming together to have an intervention for Amanda’s drinking problem. They’ve hired a therapist named Trevor, written emotional letters, chosen the time and location, and now they sit and wait for Amanda to arrive.
But there’s one thing the family neglected to mention to Trevor: Amanda does not, in fact, have a drinking problem. She’s just… the problem. Ungrateful, disrespectful, a bad seed. And they want Trevor to prove it to her once and for all. “That’s not what a therapist does,” Trevor tries to explain. But listening isn’t this family’s strong suit and they’ve already prepared for battle.
The intervention turns into a whodunnit of how and why this family is so miserable. As we flash back and forth from contested family memories to the claustrophobic intervention room, we’ll piece together the mysteries that haunt this family -- and why they’re so locked into the dynamics that make them go into survival mode around each other.
We first started writing this film after we each were involved in interventions within our own families. And those interventions were… exhausting! It’s strange when a family that doesn’t believe in therapy comes together for some last minute, Hail Mary pass at healing. After refusing to talk about anything, everything has to come out all at once. There may be no other time when you’re as acutely aware of all of the weird, overlapping, conflicting dynamics that make your family messed up. In the midst of such a moment, how presumptuous to look at a single person in the room and say -- “Hm, I think YOU have something to work on!”
The more we thought about it, the more struck we were by how an intervention is often a placeholder for all the many things that go unspoken in families – sometimes for years, and sometimes forever.
This film needs to be made because there simply aren’t enough films that actually delve into mental health and race, or even just show complex relationships that reflect families across America. Despite the rush of new commercials with interracial families, we haven’t seen a film that really explores that dynamic in depth. In particular, the idea that racism often comes from within your own family. That your parents are suspicious of you, and maybe that’s a way to protect you from the world or maybe it’s a coping mechanism, but it’s a mindf*ck of an experience that hasn’t really been explored in a movie.
We are fully charging ahead with preproduction with an optimistic goal of filming in late 2023. We already have a third of our budget accounted for, but we're looking to fundraise the bulk of our budget through fundraising this summer. We have several members of our team attached and we're excited to announce more folks as the campaign continues. We've got locations, we've got cameras, we are currently speaking to talent. This process for us began six years ago when we started working on the script, and now we're so excited to bring it to life! Be our movie doulas and help us push this thing into the world!