SIGNING OUT: Written, Produced and Featuring Adriana Leonard and Jenna Michno
Directed and Produced by Dana Brawer
About The Project – (see more here via SEED & SPARK)
Amy and Sarah unknowingly visit the same therapist years after their romantic relationship ends. Now, as young adults, they’re forced to come to terms with what actually happened, Amy fueled by hope and Sarah smothered by guilt. As they retell the experience of their first love from first kiss to final break-up, we see their love story unfold in reverse. Signing Out depicts how organically a relationship can start and end and the lasting impact a first love can have along the path to discovering oneself.
Anyone that has been part of the movie making process before knows it can be maddening! You create this thing and it becomes your baby…and every step along the way you are trying to do right by it but also fight to make it the best it can be! So why this baby? Why more than a year of research and writing and re writing and totally feeling crazy?
Well first of all..it’s a story we believe in! We wrote Signing Out because we wanted to create a piece of art that would provide a voice for two causes very close to our hearts, one behind the scenes and the other being the story itself. We wanted to create a groundwork for strong females, not only in the two leading characters, but also through a predominately female crew. Within the current push to highlight women in the film industry, it is important to see content from the female perspective. We need to see professional, dynamic, multi-dimensional and independent women represented in front of and behind the camera. As for the script, we were dedicated to telling a story about a transcendent love, blind to gender, in a mainstream way.
Many same sex couples today endure struggles that heterosexual couples don’t face. However, our vision was not to highlight those struggles, although there are, of course, stories like that that need to be told. Our goal was to create a relationship so real and so raw that audiences might forget they were even watching a film about a same sex couple in the first place. We wanted to portray a relationship facing the phases that most romantic relationships go through – friendship, lust, love, growth, change. And we believe that this is something people can relate to, regardless of gender. Our hopes are to produce a final product that, instead of focusing on queerness as otherness, helps direct the conversation of LGBTQ politics and relationships towards the topic of oneness. Love is love, and it’s time for mainstream and commercial same sex love stories to enter the marketplace.
With our film, we hope to establish this movement not as a trend, but as an established level of equality within the film industry. If we can use filmmaking to align our passion with that sense of purpose, we will truly feel we have succeeded.
BIOS:
Adriana Leonard – Writer/Producer/Actor
From South Carolina, Adriana attended college at USC with a BA in Theatre & PR. During her time there, she traveled to study theatre at Regents College in London, training with a variety of instructors over varied techniques. A dancer her whole life, Adriana is grateful to have been able to combine her passion for dance with acting, appearing on ABC Family in “A Cinderella Story” and on CW’s pilot “Heart of Dixie.” In 2014, Adriana produced and acted in the feature film Camouflage, a moral story raising awareness for mental illness and bullying, which she raised all the funding for via Kickstarter. She is looking forward to the release of the two studio features she recently worked on this year – “Mr. Church” with Eddie Murphy and “Cross 2” with Danny Trejo.
Jenna Michno – Writer/Producer/Actor
Jenna is a ballerina turned actress who traded 17 years of classical ballet training for the bright lights of a film set. Jenna studied theater at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. In NYC, she trained with first generation Meisner instructor Nina Murano and performed in off-broadway original work at the La MaMa Theatre. Her credits include several independent films such as The Backseat (winner at Manhattan Film Festival, RxSM & The International Indie Gathering) and Abigail Schwarz’s upcoming Those Who Wander, with Bonnie Wright. Most recently, she co-wrote, produced and stars in the comedic webseries, Making It: The Series.
Dana Brawer – Director/Producer
Dana is an award winning director, writer and editor currently working in Los Angeles. She is an honors graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts and has worked at several high powered media companies, most notably Paramount Pictures, Viacom, Fremantle Media, and Cinetic Media. Her short documentary film, Howard’s Hops, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2010. She has received numerous awards for her most recent film, The Red Card, which has screened in over ten international film festivals. The short won a Platinum Remi at Worldfest Houston, an Award of Merit, Special Mention in the Best Shorts Competition, an Award of Merit at Indiefest, and it was nominated for Best Short Film at the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto. The Red Card has now been licensed by Shorts HD. Dana also won the award for ‘Best Editor’ in The Monthly Film Festival for her work on Sweet Hollow, and was a recent first place finalist in the 2016 B~STEM Hall of Fame Films Competition.
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