FILMMAKER’S STATEMENT

When my father died, I was 19. The two of us had a great deal of unfinished business between us. This film grew out of unsettled emotions and the distress I felt from being left by someone who I hadnʼt known life without. “Heart of Now” is a love letter to him, allowing me to say that I would like to forgive him for his faults and free myself from the influence of his absence.

On “Heart of Now”, the process of shaping this film began with the screenplay. The words were treated as a guide. They were there to inform, to spark discussion, to provide a point of departure for the charactersʼ natural evolution.

We followed our creative intuition to prepare for the journey, but still had plenty of “mystery” left to discover on set. With our attention very much present to these characters, we began to shed light on their brokenness, understanding a bit more of that mystery each day.

The crew and I provided a safe, nurturing environment for the actors to explore the hopes, longing and loneliness of their characters – so we could capture their humanity truthfully and without judgement. And it resided with all of us to ask if we could go deeper, if there was more for us to explore, so that we could walk away with an understanding that none of us could have discovered alone.

Finally, it fell to the editor to re-discover this film within the 50 hours of improvised material we amassed by exploring every option and honoring the most truthful and compelling elements of that process.

The title of this motion picture is an illustration of being in the present moment – a point when our attention is so true that we lose and transcend ourselves. Our hope is for an audience to discover the same relevance that we did and for this story to resonate in some meaningful and unexpected ways.

Zak Forsman, writer/director

SYNOPSIS

HEART OF NOW is a quiet and understated debut feature that explores the inclination to define ourselves by the people who leave us. Amber is a young woman with a profound longing for a sense of family. When she discovers she is pregnant, her boyfriend withdraws and moves out while her closest friends insist that she get an abortion.

Abandoned at every turn, Amber willfully seeks a safe haven in Gabe – the father figure that left her and her dying mother a decade ago.
Amber is whisked across urban, natural and emotional landscapes where she descends into a downward spiral that eclipses her moral center and shatters her illusions. Stripped of any possibility for self-deception, she confronts the root cause of her suffering and frees herself of its influence in a brief, transcendent moment at the very heart of now.

PRODUCTION NOTES

HEART OF NOW is the result of an interdependent film collaboration among several artists that worked together in a creatively safe atmosphere where exploration was encouraged at every level of the filmmaking process.

Through dramatic improvisation, the actors were empowered to find their voice and use their own words wherever possible under the guidance of the director. The result departs from what was written in the screenplay, revealing a more honest experience for the characters and filmmakers behind them.

Using that screenplay as a guide, the filmmakers and principal cast collaborated to organically shape the characters, endeavoring to explore the story in-the- moment through guided improvisations.

The attribute of ‘a film by SABI’ honors this journey by crediting authorship to the entire Sabi Pictures family of filmmakers and actors who achieved what no one could have done alone.