Evelyn McHale is a young wife to be in the 1940s. One morning, Evelyn’s feeds her fiancé Barry breakfast as she experiences a flashback to when she was young and her mother, Helen, fed her family. Helen is a disheveled woman who doesn’t meet the “perfect housewife” standard. The film continues to cut between time periods, showing the parallels between Evelyn’s parents’ relationship and Evelyn’s relationship with Barry. Helen leaves her husband and child, and eventually Evelyn leaves her fiancé as well.
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Student Spotlight: Tendencies
10-minutes
Evelyn McHale is a young wife to be in the 1940s. One morning, Evelyn's feeds her fiancé Barry breakfast as she experiences a flashback to when she was young and her mother, Helen, fed her family. Helen is a disheveled woman who doesn't meet the "perfect housewife" standard. The film continues to cut between time periods, showing the parallels between Evelyn's parents' relationship and Evelyn's relationship with Barry. Helen leaves her husband and child, and eventually Evelyn leaves her fiancé as well.
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Student Spotlight: Tendencies
Student Spotlight: Tendencies
Filmmaker Notes:
We made this film because we were intrigued by the gaps left in Evelyn McHale’s story. Parts of her life resonated in each of our lives in different ways. At heart, this is a film about family and navigating the transitions between being a daughter and a woman on your own. We also wanted to explore the ways in which an individual’s environment affects their growth. We were interested in seeing if there were similarities between our experiences as women today and what it was like to be a woman in the 1940s. Often, there are small micro aggressions that we have observed in our everyday lives that contribute to the reality of being silenced in society because of our gender. We felt that some of the restraints Evelyn may have experienced were similar to those we encounter even today, which made this story relevant and necessary for us to tell. We hope that the film communicates the subtle, yet traumatizing ways in which women are boxed in and held captive by their surroundings. Cellie and I came together to work on this project with the initial shared love for music and songwriting. We hoped to tell a lot of our story through deliberate interplay between sound and image. We built the music and soundscape from scratch, wanting to exercise our muscles in that area. The making of this film taught us so much both production-wise and personally. Cellie and I have both grown as artists, collaborators, and people throughout this process, and we will carry that with us through whatever projects we approach in the future.
Film details
Year(s) screened
- 2017
Subtitles
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