Ahhhh….So now One of my Books is a Short Movie
Would you believe that? Mangoes and Blood is in a film competition. My best friend, my brother of the heart, surprised me by not only entering it but financing the actual filming, something there was no way I could ever do. As he did so, he brought in a bright, rising young director, one who told me that once he had started reading Mangoes and Blood he could not put it down.
What more could a seventy-six-year-old ‘Grandma Moses’ type wish for? Actually, while bursting with joy, I was deeply perturbed. This short was something we, my incredible producer and pal who has done my website, my Buzzsprout series, even the Audible cover of Mangoes and Blood, were going to do together as a pitch for a real movie. However, we had been looking for the means for over two years and nothing had come up.
And there was something else that really drew me in to do this with the young director — his age. When I asked, he told me he was twenty-nine. That was when I wrote this novelette. Oh, yes, I edited it before putting it out in 2020 (twenty-twenty), but it was as I had written it, the work of a young woman of the 1970s, of a special period in the world, one full of international kidnappings, hostage situations, and historic changes, one which reverberates today, as most of the young leaders of that time are now gone while a few remain as too often geriatric throwbacks to a different planet. Of course, some have kept evolving, but more have forgotten what the period in the book really meant for those living it.
I was not wrong. Watching the director work intensely as he had it filmed, redoing scenes not once, not twice, but, with limited means, even more than a dozen times, and the main actress bring tears to my eyes as she ended the short with a cry, I knew that the hearts of the people trying to bring the words into life were carrying understanding and compassion with them.
This past weekend, my pal, gave me a green light by pointing out that this was a way to bring the story to the public, making me hope that the story’s depth will strike other hearts and spirits, and that it will contribute a positive drop to meeting the challenges that we, humans, face.
