Filming HER LOVER feature July 2025
Original Made From Scratch
Praise for HER LOVER proof-of-concept
HER LOVER is an evocative short film that pits Sandy and Cecil, two new parents, against the shared past, the haunting secrets, and the choices that led them to their new life. Mary Healy brings a heartfelt yearning to the role of SANDY, striving to understand how her mother’s decisions about her lover and her unborn child have affected her life. Michael Emery is both emotional and steely as the lover who fears revealing too much about the past and jeopardizing his future. Viewers are left wanting more and pondering the choices they might make in a similar situation. HER LOVER is a cautionary tale, a painfully real allegory, and a haunting reflection on intimacy, showcasing a beautiful cinematic depth of technique in rich colors and drama, highlighting the multi-layered familial emotions of deception, tension, and fear. Our brilliant cast navigates the delicate present while besieged by the treachery of memory and the past.
Watch the Trailer
The Feature in Pre-Production
HER LOVER
Her Lover is a story of a mother and daughter, connected through the years, and how they deal with that connection, or don’t. It’s a matter of life and death.
In 1975 a woman is in turmoil. She has a family with tween daughters, a friend and lover, a husband, a sense that the world is changing around her and a question of how should she be in this new world, or should she be in it at all? Then, years later in 1990, on one night, the woman’s grown daughter reaches the breaking point, remembers her mother, the choices she made, and tries to deal with the fact that she now has a baby with her mother’s lover. This young woman asks: Why didn’t he tell her about the affair that took place when she was a child? Did she have his baby on purpose? Is she loosing her mind? Should she stay with this man who is tied to her past and present?
Can you focus too much on what has happened and not be able to see what you should do in the present?
Our proof of concept short is winning awards on the festival circuit and we are poised to film the feature with all cast and crew attached.
in development at Rocaberti Writer's Retreat, Angoulême France, October 2024
Investors Wanted - Let us show you the business plan.
Why
I hope the take away for people seeing this film is an understanding that this family’s love, over the years, is impossible and deep, complicated, hurtful, insensitive, and delicate. That memory is hard to pin down, secrets are easy to keep, even from ourselves, and that they all did it for love! And that “You only hurt the ones you love” is another catch phrase to add to “Sometimes you have to hold on to let go.” Both speak to the incredible connection between parent and child, between the generations, between family.
Why Now
I feel a powerful connection to telling a story about a family that has these deep connections. When I was a kid my mom counseled a family member against having an abortion. They didn’t go through with it. I've always wondered about the connection of parent and child, how we affect each other, how we try to do the right thing by each other, and how sometimes we just don’t.
