“Pumpkin” a heartbreaking short film made as a personal eulogy to friend
Paula Ferro Neves is a 23 years old filmmaker in Los Angeles that saw the opportunity to say goodbye to a friend through her art. Her movie “Pumpkin”, financed with the help of friends and family through the crowdfunding platform IndieGogo. The story is about long distance friendship between Alice and Dan. The teenagers, besides facing the distance between them, now had to face a recently diagnosed cancer.
Daniel’s character was inspired on Paula’s teenage friend from, in real life, North Carolina. The met through a friend and became close friends. At the age of 16, Dan was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away three months later. Paula and Dan got to meet in person, and kept a long distance friendship until his last days. The name Pumpkin was how he used to call her.
The idea of making a movie about that came during a screenwriting class, when the teacher asked them to write numerous stories, names or situations that happen to them and could be interesting to share. Paula thought of the relationship we had stablished with technology and social media and decided to explore it. Instead of focusing on how technology creates shallow and distant relationships, she focused on how technology can bring people closer.
Although being a student film, Pumpkin won many awards. It premiered on Cannes Film Festival in March 2016, at the Short Film Corner. After the premiere, Pumpkin won Best Short Drama in festivals like Best Shorts Competition, Women’s Only Entertainment Film Festival, Hollywood International Moving Picture Film Festival and was as Semi-Finalist at the Los Angeles CineFest. Besides the awards the movie won, Paula herself was awarded as Best Director for Largo Film Festival, and Best Director, Best Writer and Best Editor from Women’s Only Entertainment Film Festival, also with Pumpkin.
The goal now is to work on writing the feature for the movie. Paula says the short would be just the beginning of Alice’s journey and she is happy to see where the homage to her friend has got to.
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For more information o this short film visit the official movie page
