Of interest - proceeds of the film go to the Nashville Rescue Mission (a magnanimous act, indeed), but I seem to recall that the Mission holds fairly narrow views about panhandling and often states that panhandling is done only to "feed drug and alcohol addictions". Not sure how Mr. Treadway will be able to reconcile this dichotomy, but nonetheless, the Mission can use the money, since they provide a one of a kind service that is desperately needed here in Nashville.
Sunday, 07/22/07 $6 Man, the story of a father (Philip Roebuck) and his 10-year-old daughter (Constance Owl) who become homeless, will screen Thursday at Watkins College of Art and Design Theater. Directed by Jon Russell Cring, the film was shot mostly in Nashville. New local film explores themes of fatherhood and homelessnessHendersonville filmmaker Jon Russell Cring gives new meaning to the word prolific. Since January, he and his company, F3 Films, have completed a handful of feature-length movies. By the end of the year, they plan to have produced and premiered a total of a dozen features. Cring calls the initiative the Extra/Ordinary Film Project, a moniker that refers to more than just the rate at which he and his team, which includes his wife, Tracy, a cinematographer Their latest completed project, $6 Man, tells the story of a young father who, due to a conspiracy of forces, including the death of his wife, finds himself homeless and living on the streets with his 10-year-old daughter. Cring said that the film, which is being shown at the Watkins College of Art and Design Theater at 7 p.m. on Thursday, isn't as much about being homeless as it is about the relationship between a father and a daughter. "The man loses his wife and he's lost; he doesn't know what to do," he explained. "All that he's sure of is that he wants to be with his daughter as much as he possibly can. But they have to eat, so he comes up with this concept, this '$6 plan.' " According to his scheme, which the father devises as an alternative to panhandling or availing himself of soup kitchens and other social services, he works an hour a day in order to earn $6. This gives him and his daughter $2 each day for breakfast, two more for dinner, one to buy a book that they can read together and another for the girl to buy something else with. It's a quixotic notion, to say the least, and Cring pointed out that throughout the film, the father has a habit of doing "the wrong thing for all the right reasons." And yet the goal of the movie, he added, is less to provide answers than to get his audience to think. "People might have one opinion of the father at the start of the movie, but once they see what he has with his daughter, they look at him in a different light. They might yearn for that sort of connection with their own children." 'Not a downer film' $6 Man stars Seattle actor Philip Roebuck in the role of the father, Blake Sorrenson, and Constance Owl, a self-possessed 10-year-old from North Carolina, in the role of his daughter Natalie. The entire movie was shot on the streets of Nashville except for those scenes filmed at the urban settlement of converted dumpsters that the Sorrenson's call "home." All of those scenes were shot in nearby Columbia. Despite its gritty setting, the movie, Cring said, is "not a downer film. It's about what it means to be a father. It's about trying to preserve family connections." The inspiration for the movie, he went on to explain, came from such dialog-driven '70s films as Ordinary People and Dog Day Afternoon, pictures that tell the stories of everyday people struggling to make sense of the often challenging situations in which they find themselves. "Everybody's life is Ben Hur, they just don't know it," Cring said. "Everybody's life is an epic, but for some reason, we're not getting those stories anymore, at least not from Hollywood. All that anyone out there seems to care about are biopics and cars blowing up. "Most people live in a world that lies somewhere between Michael Moore and NASCAR. That's where most of us live, I really believe that, and that's the world that the Extra/Ordinary Film Project is committed to exploring." Proceeds from Thursday's screening of $6 Man will benefit the Nashville Rescue Mission. |
