From iPads to cell phones to laptops, the modern world is more attached to technology than ever before, a reality that is explored in a feature film co-created by an Ohio University professor.
Annie Howell, an assistant professor in the School of Film, co-wrote and co-directed Small, Beautifully Moving Parts with Lisa Robinson. The film, which stars Anna Margaret Hollyman, has received critical acclaim from media outlets such as AOL’s moviefone, The L Magazine and IFC.com.
“We use (technology) to understand our problems, we use it to communicate, we use it to find comfort,” Robinson said.
After originally using Sarah Sparks, the main character of the movie, in the Web series Sparks, Howell and Robinson decided to place her in slightly more complicated situations.
“We just wanted to go deeper with this character and find a more emotionally complex experience, but yet one that also let us play with the humor of these scenarios. It’s really a poignant comedy,” Howell said.
Sparks featured a slightly more fantastical element than Small, Beautifully Moving Parts, Howell said. In the Web series, for instance, the character was able to communicate with technology.
In the movie, Sarah is faced with a much more real set of problems, as she is pregnant and decides to try to answer some of her questions about parenting by heading on a road trip to find her estranged mother, who has been living off the grid.
“She’s sort of looking for answers for her own big life change that’s coming, and she’s starting to renegotiate her relationship with technology,” Howell said. “She adores phones and old radios and she fixes things. On her road trip, things start to fall apart.”
The film presents a woman who is beginning to have doubts about her motherhood, and is partially based on Howell and Robinson’s own experiences raising children.
“It’s certainly not a typical film about impending motherhood, showing someone who’s facing a milestone that’s been portrayed most of the time as the impending bliss of motherhood,” Robinson said.
“Instead, we’re showing a character who’s a woman who maybe has some ambivalence about what that means.”
By exploring nervousness about the oncoming reality of parenthood, Howell and Robinson are attempting to take new steps in film, showing that women can be as nervous about parenthood as men are.
“We’ve both thought about the change between not having kids and then suddenly once you’re a mother, you’re going to be a mother forever … And the sort of fear and ambivalence that comes with that, which is not often explored on film,” Howell said.
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