Logline:
As Kevin takes up the well-rehearsed Lord’s Prayer at the end of his unexpected working day, during the Christmas break, he struggles through it as it forces him to reflect on his difficult day and come to terms with his relationship with his father.
Outline:
It’s the 28th of December, and KEVIN arrives home from an unexpected day at work at an IT company. He is exhausted and deflated with just some frozen pizza, ice cream and beer to comfort him. As is his ritual, somewhere within his evening he recites the Lord’s Prayer; but this time it’s different. He struggles to make his way through the ancient invocation, as it’s interrupted with thoughts about his day, and in particular, his own father, since spending Christmas Day with him.
He tries to drown unpleasant thoughts and feelings with his phone or TV, but it seems everything is set on forcing him to face the hard facts of the day and of the looming presence of his father. It takes a phone call from his sister, ABBIE, who shares a video call of a choir performance they were both originally planning on going to, and the haunting music, to finally unlock him.
At last, he is able to find solace in reciting the prayer, in his own way, hearing only his own voice; and he experiences a divine presence unlike anything he’s known before.
Themes:
What is prayer in everyday life? The film tries to explore the relationship between a religious person’s hopes of living through sacred times and spaces, and the mundane realities that all humans live with. It is set after Christmas for this reason - that weird space before New Years where none of us really knows what day of the week it is because we have interrupted our routines, as we’ve set the time apart.
It also explores the relationship between how we perceive the divine, and how this relates to our parents. In particular, the Judeo-Christian framing of God as Father, which has implications of how one perceives the divine Father and one’s earthly Father. And so, Kevin, in order to find that sacred space he so longs for, needs to in fact engage with the difficult realities of his relationship with his own father just after having spent Christmas Day with him.
Director's Statement
Simon Parnham (Writer/Director/Producer)
The history of films exploring religious and spiritual subjects is vast.
Whether from George Melies’ Joan of Arc (1900); the opulent days of Hollywood’s Golden Era with the likes of the ‘The Ten Commandments’ (1956) and ‘Ben Hur’ (1959); Swedish Auteur Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Faith Trilogy’ films (1961 - 1963) to more recently, Martin Scorsese’s ‘Silence’ (2016) and Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Mother’ (2017); we’ve been trying to explore stories of the far-reaching ends of our material existence since we’ve started making films.
And those are just the films that do it explicitly.
With early primates staring up a black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the booming voice of James Earl Jones speaking out of the mystical clouds of the African Savannah, the stories well tell in films are dripping with religious iconography, imagery and meaning.
Scorsese, when talking about the same idea, says that “there is a spirituality in films”. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that films are really just reflected light shining back at us.
But most of the examples I’ve mentioned explore our relationship with the divine or the metaphysical through extremes. They take their characters to places beyond themselves, to force them to reckon with their own mortality and frailty; and there find themselves and ‘something else’.
But as a religious person myself I know that this is only partly true to the experience. Most of my religiosity expresses itself in day-to-day normal life, where nothing much particularly spectacular happens. In fact, for me this is potentially its most life-giving quality - that my experiences with the divine are part of everyday life and not something that rings only true when I have an ‘extreme’ experience.
And this is what I wanted to try and capture in the story of ‘Our Father’. The experience that countless Christians, and people of other faiths have, daily. We come to prayer, for example, as a ritual - which is sometimes inspiring, and sometimes routine. But it anchors us, and we find the ‘something’, or ‘someone else’ there.
I wanted to tell a story about entering into someone’s prayer as a form of meditation on their quite mundane and regular day. The prayer becomes a form of self-reflection, where transformation is available, if our character is willing to go somewhere within himself that he has been avoiding. To allow the ‘someone else’, the divine ‘other’ that he appeals to in his prayer to answer it, he needs to first go where he doesn’t want to.
My hope is that this film may contribute a small voice to the vast array of religious films; and that audiences can find in it a shared experience of that seemingly intangible quality in life that we have spent so many generations trying to make sense of.
What is your gift going towards?
The funding goal of £17,500 is there to support the project from pre-production (the planning stage) through production (where we film it), post-production (where do editing, sound mixing, colour grading) and submitting to a few festivals. So, in short, the whole thing.
The amount is generally at the lower end of professional budgets, and so this target serves as a minimum to achieve the project at a point in which everyone involved is paid properly. However, this is not a ‘get it all or keep nothing’ project option, but rather, what we do make in the campaign will be kept towards the project.
If we don’t reach the target, then there will be a good number of corners that will need to be cut, but a short film shall be made! The main area that would need to be reviewed is how much money is allocated to each area of production.
If we reach our goal, we will be breaking up our budget, broadly, into these percentages:
Simon is currently spearheading this project, with a few confirmed crew roles. As such he is also serving as Producer on the project, but with the funding, the opportunity for collaboration with a co-producer will be made available.
Timeline
With the target funding goal, we are anticipating the overall schedule to be.
Funding Campaign: 15th of November, 2024 to 20th of December, 2024
Pre-Production: To the 15th of February, 2025
Production: To 1st of March, 2025
Post-Production: To 30th of March, 2025
Please do note that some of the rewards are subject to the film’s completion, and so are dated a few months after the post-production of the short film is completed.
Who is this guy?
Simon Parnham is a filmmaker and educator. He graduated with a 1st Honours BA in Digital Filmmaking in 2014, and since then has furthered his qualifications with a Fellowship in Higher Education and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Professional Practice in Creative Media Industries. Simon has 9 years of experience of working as a lecturer, and 4 years as head of a film department at SAE Institute Glasgow. In that time, he also was an international film programme lead across multiple campuses, and led the team that developed the new Content Creation and Online Marketing BA/BSc programme.
Alongside academic experience, Simon has worked as a freelance videographer producing training, promotional and music videos over the last decade. He has worked with multiple clients including Judo Scotland, South Lanarkshire Council, Action for Children, the Byres Road & Lanes Business Improvement District, and produced training materials used by, amongst others, Royal Bank of Scotland and SAE Institute.
Simon trades under the business name Merkstreet. This project is part of a new business direction to produce fiction and non-fiction films.
Thank you!
Thank you for taking the time to read through this funding campaign. Even if you can’t make a donation, please get in touch and let us know what you think.
Updates will be forthcoming on the Merkstreet social media pages, which you can find on Instagram, Facebook and/or X (artist formerly known as Twitter).
If you like the project but aren’t in a position to donate, then you can still support us by sharing about the crowdfunder on your social media pages, (or in-person).
And on a final note, we hope you have a very Merry Christmas with all your favourite people around you.