ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
A young woman’s reckless trajectory is diverted along a more compassionate path by her father’s dying wish that she learn wooden boat-building from a revered craftsman in Maine.

SYNOPSIS
REVERSING FALLS chronicles the fateful meeting of two forces of nature: a wild young woman careening along an aimless, selfish odyssey, and a renowned solo sailor and founder of a boat-building school, whose wisdom and charisma have forged him a mythical status on the Maine coast. Having frittered away her youthful potential after being abandoned by her mother at a tender age, Maya Nichols suddenly learns of her father’s dying wish that she fulfill her long-delayed promise to build a boat with him at the Keel Craft school in far away Brooklin, Maine. Except now that he’s gone, she will have to go it alone.

Through a serio-comic lens, our film explores identity and parental legacy, wrestling with what each generation owes the other. As parents, how much responsibility should we take for shaping our children’s lives; and as children, how do we forge our identity beyond the bounds of the desires, life choices and personalities of our progenitors? Set in a contemporary era and entwined with the heritage of wooden boat-building on the coast of Maine, Reversing Falls explores life’s shifting currents: the heedless rush of youth, the ebbs and flows of mid-life dissatisfaction, the delicate family balance challenged by storms of addiction, the generational ripples of abandonment and loss.

The film is a funny, touching arrested-development coming-of-age story following our self-sabotaging heroine, Maya, as she strives to unwind the mystery of her mother’s disappearance from her life, comes to terms with the regret of leaving her father behind in turn, and finally, through her tumultuous relationship with Bishop, gains the capacity to shift her expectations of what kind of person she is destined to become.

PROJECT TYPE Narrative Feature

DIRECTOR Sean Mewshaw
SCREENWRITER Desi Van Til
PRODUCER Desi Van Til, Sean Mewshaw, Jon Levin
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Wendy Poole, John & Linda Coleman, Fritz & Susan Onion, Peter Carpenter, Bill Creighton
CO-PRODUCER Deborah Sims

WEBSITE rusticatorpictures.com

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