Heritage Day
After Evie dresses up like her estranged grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, on “Heritage Day” at school, she becomes increasingly obsessed with this dark part of her family history.
Interview with Writer/Director Lara Everly
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And this film is inspired by a personal incident in my childhood where I wanted to dress up like my Auschwitz-surviving grandmother, Eva, for a heritage presentation. While this film takes place in the 1980s, it tackles a massive shadow that is culturally bursting to be discussed. This is a mother/child story that explores how children process their own family history. This is both a period piece and a now piece. Through the portal of something personal, we are touching on society's deep need to reckon with the past.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
Our society is deeply uncomfortable with its history of intolerance, so how do we teach our children about it, and further honor their heritage, without romanticizing the trauma? The Holocaust is a complex and tender topic, one that has primarily been handled through documentary and drama. This film tackles the topic through the lens of subsequent generations and heartfelt humor.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
My passion is female-centric dark comedies. I love telling stories that disrupt that status quo and make audiences rethink the way they originally thought about something. I gravitate toward the female-identifying experience and am drawn to stories of motherhood.
In this film, I explore mother/child relationships and how we handle the stigma of shameful history and its murky shadows. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor myself, I’m interested in the conflict of finding connection and kinship to your personal heritage that happens to hail from a tragic part of history. Children often don’t understand the culture and social lines of what games are okay to play. The film explores the comedic irony that Evie is recreating a world that everyone else is trying to forget. Evie is at the age where her truth drives her actions way more than social norms and in the 80s, social norms were pretty key. Her behavior makes her mother, Sarah, question herself as a parent, and ultimately sympathize more with her own mom
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
This film really wants to be a feature. I had to widdle it down many times in order to make it a short film, and it's still arguably too long.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
We had a cast and crew screening for friends and family and it had an amazing response. The comedy angle of such a tender topic was really well received and sparked super thoughtful conversation in the Q&A. This month we are screening at the following film festivals: Palm Springs, Bentonville and Maui.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
I anticipate some feedback where people will push against the idea that the Holocaust should be handled from a non-documentarian or dramatic approach. I am interested in telling the perspective of the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. It's 2 generations removed, and culture keeps changing. It's a point of view we haven't heard from enough.
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
Ultimately, we want to get the word on there about the film as it's a proof of concept for a feature version that we intend to be the next step
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
We are looking for a production company to buy the rights and fund the development of the feature film.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
One way of honoring what my grandparents and 6 million Jews went through in the Holocaust is storytelling, so this film is for them, but it's not just for the Jewish community, it's for Asian American community and all marginalized people. This film is a conversation starter on how we teach future generations about the dark pasts of history and how we shield them without erasing culture. It's complex and nuanced and in process to say the least. But we can start to explain intolerance to children and how dehumanizing language should give us chills down our spine and resistance in our veins. And I'm a big believer in humor as a path to healing. There are parts of the film that will make you cringe and parts that will make you laugh and parts that will do both. With laughter, we can begin to process things in a new way.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
I'll reiterate what I said above:
This film is a conversation starter on how do we teach future generations about the dark parts of history. How do we shield children from traumatic history without erasing culture?
Would you like to add anything else?
Vivien Lyra Blair is available for an interview if you’d like.
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
I directed an episode of American Auto S2 called The Letter. And another project which Elease also produced, a comedic short about reproductive rights entitled Always & Forever, took home a Webby award and a AICP nomination.
Interview: June 2023
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
Heritage Day
After Evie dresses up like her estranged grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, on “Heritage Day” at school, she becomes increasingly obsessed with this dark part of her family history.
Director: Lara Everly
Producer: Elease Lui Stemp
Writer: Lara Everly
About the writer, director and producer:
LARA EVERLY is an award-winning director who celebrates female-driven content and dark comedy. An Upright Citizens Brigade graduate, Lara’s sharp wit and clever comedy sensibility first gained attention in her sketch comedy content. She's adept at bringing humor to unexpected topics and disrupting the status quo. As a filmmaker, her narrative films and documentaries have played the film festival circuit, winning awards and procuring distribution through Amazon, ShortsHD and New Wave Entertainment. Lara has written and directed for a range of platforms including Disney, Netflix Family, Refinery29, Scary Mommy, Oprah, Funny or Die, Awestruck, Swing Left, Acronym, Babycenter and more. As a commercial director, she’s worked with Fisher Price, Walmart, Little Tikes, Supermajority, Netflix, Future Forward, Schwarzkopf to name a few. Everly is launching her television directing career this fall with American Auto for NBC. When she is not wrangling a cast and crew, Lara’s wrangling her children and rescue pets. And most importantly, she won the California Science Fair at 12-years-old. She is repped by Gersh Talent Agency, Echo Lake Entertainment and Backyard.
ELEASE LUI STEMP is a producer with over twenty years of experience in the entertainment industry on a variety of projects across diverse genres and platforms. Her recent credits include the 2020 Peabody Award-winning PBS series, Asian Americans, Fantastic Fungi (Netflix), The Last Movie Stars (HBO), The Men Who Sold the World Cup (Discovery), and 2019 Peabody Winner, Inventing Tomorrow (PBS). Heritage Day is the fourth film Lara and Elease have collaborated on together as a director/producer team. Their last political short, Always & Forever, starring X Mayo, Juliet Donenfeld and Lexy Kolker, is a recipient of a 2023 Webby Award for Public Service and Activism. Other collaborations include The Big Day, starring Sasheer Zamata and Paul Scheer, and Free to Laugh, a short documentary about formerly incarcerated women learning stand-up comedy. Elease is a social and environmental advocate and when she's not making films, she works for the UCLA Center for Climate Science.
Key cast: Rachel Bloom, Vivien Lyra Blair, Scott Michael Foster, Sierra Katow, Pam Murphy, Alex Jayne Go, Kirk Fox
Looking for: sales agents, distributors, journalists, buyers
Facebook: Lara Everly
Twitter: @LaraEverly
Instagram: @heritagedayfilm
Hashtags used: #heritageday #rachelbloom #vivienlyrablair #femalefilmmakers #darkcomedy #jewish #jewishfilm #jewishcomedy #womenfilmmakers #threegenerations
Other: IMDb
Made in association with: Sligo Studios and Protect What We Love
Funders: Seed and Spark, Protect What We Love
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month?
Bentonville Film Festival June 16th
Palm Springs Film Festival June 25th