New York- and Florida-based director and producer Roxanna Lewis leaned into her own childhood for the short film Run Wild, which screens Thursday night at the San Antonio Film Festival.
Shot on super 16 mm film, the movie follows a young girl named Rayla, whose erratic father picks her up for a weekend visitation that veers between the enlightening and the disturbing. The addicted, estranged father has just been released from prison, and he’s determined to teach his daughter a life lesson by telling her to walk alone into the desert near his trailer.
Lewis explained that the relationship and the film’s central incident draw from her own experience with a father who struggled with addiction and mental illness. While the movie doesn’t offer easy answers or a pat ending, it shines a light on the pain parents can carry and the power of healing and acceptance.
“At the end of my father’s life, what I felt was the most important and what I realized is how he guarded his sobriety, that his sobriety was the most important thing in the world to him over all else,” Lewis said of her own dynamic with a damaged parent.
As its central character, Rayla, Run Wild features Jophielle Love, who was nominated for a Daytime Emmy for her role on General Hospital. The film also includes a brief appearance by two-time Emmy winner Sally Struthers (All in the Family).
The Current spoke to Lewis — who entered the world of filmmaking through work as a stage director, choreographer, dancer and actress — via phone about the film, her own family background and the long road to healing many families face.
At the beginning of the film, we see Rayla with her mother, and it shows just how different the two parents are in lifestyle, ethnic background and pretty much everything else. Did you develop a backstory as to how the two ended up together, or was that left void with the hope that people would fill in the blanks themselves?
Well, I really love that question, because firstly, this is based on a true story that happened with me and my dad. And he took me out to the desert when I was about 6 years old. And in some ways, this is a very G-rated version of that very big, scary experience for me. I mean, no physical harm was done, but let’s just say it wasn’t the average visitation weekend. Also my own family does have these very diverse backgrounds. [One of the reasons] this was created is my dad had passed away, and I am an only child. He is my dad and he had a lot of problems.
But the answer to your question is yes. I have though really, really hard about what the background to this story is, because I’m actually expanding this into a feature, which is primarily [focused on] his background.
That’s focused on in the feature, because what’s not gone into here is the fact that his dad was an extremely well-respected engineer who was murdered. And my father early in his life was dealing with that, but my father was also a brilliant man who was misdiagnosed early on because we now have [mental health classifications] that didn’t exist back 40, 50 years ago, if you will.
I did leave it hanging on purpose in this film, because in this short, I wanted audiences to have to think about it. But I’m excited, because I didn’t know if this film would resonate with anybody. I am deeply moved that I get the kind of responses that I do and have gotten so much support to continue to expand it into a feature. And I think part of that is because of the real complexities that go into someone’s life.
Run Wild is elliptical. A lot goes unsaid, and it doesn’t promise an easy resolution to the characters’ pain. What do you want audiences to take away from it?
I think there are several things. … One thing is that we’ve had neglect, right? Emotional neglect or physical neglect or circumstances for some of us that really edge on abuse. And I think the biggest thing for me in this film is really the message that I understand how personal those feelings are. And I think they become secrets. They can become secrets that we carry into adulthood. And I think the biggest thing that I want to say is that, I don’t know, you can tell me that this isn’t appropriate, but when shit happens as a kid, it doesn’t mean that we have to necessarily carry it into our lives as an adult. That no matter what, if somebody has kind of sprinkled the poison around you, you can still make your own choices.
You can still make a decision about how you want to show up for yourself. And at the end of this film, there’s the question of who’s going to show up for who? Is everybody going to be OK?
At the end of this film — as the filmmaker — I decided that I was going to show up on my own terms, redefining for myself what it means to love without the obligation of somebody else’s expectation.
This isn’t the first film festival where you have screened Run Wild. What have the audience reactions been like?
I have to share with you, I love when guys come up and talk with me. I think it’s really resonated with a lot of guys. … I mean, the truth is a lot of audience members come up to me, and whether they’re male or female or whatever, they’ll say, “Wow, that was my life.” Or, “Wow, that could have been me. ” Or, “What happened?” I mean, people are very drawn in and want to know what happens next. And I have found that like with any other film, people either really love it or they don’t get it. But my experience has been that when we’ve gone to festivals, it’s been incredibly well-received, and people have walked up to me, thank goodness, and shared their personal stories or wanted to discuss the meaning of it, and they have asked me to keep going.
We experience so much of the movie through Rayla’s reaction to what’s going on. How difficult was it to direct a child actor who’s so central to the film?
Jophielle is the first child actress that I’ve worked with, and it was not difficult for me at all. I really, really loved it. Part of that I think is I’m the mother of two, so I kind of understand what I needed to do to get something that I’m looking for in the big picture. But it also helped that Jophielle Love is an extraordinary actress. She is a quintessential professional who really does have a tremendous amount of skills.
$11.49 and up, 9 p.m. Thursday, July 23, Radius Center, 106 Auditorium Cir #120, (210) 227-8111, safilm.com.
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