Daphne McWilliams’ In A Perfect World Doc To Play At 2015 Los Angeles Film FestivalPosted by Wilson Morales
June 10, 2015
Making its World Premiere and playing at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival is Daphne McWilliams’ directorial debut with ‘In A Perfect World.’ The film will shown on Sunday, June 14, 2015 as part of the Documentary Competition.
In a Perfect World…” is a feature documentary that aims to explore all the requisite dynamics of what it is to be a man raised by a single mother. The inspiration for the film came from the director’s own relationship with her son who has a largely absentee father.
Over the course of several years, Daphne McWilliams, who was a producer on Spike Lee’s ‘4 Little Girls,’ began interviewing men about the relationships they had with their mothers and, to varying degrees, their absentee fathers. At the same time, she was raising her own son, Chase, as a single parent. She noticed that as Chase entered his teens, their relationship took a dramatic turn as he began coping with his most formative years and becoming an adult without the consistent presence of his own father. McWilliams realized it was time to turn the camera on her own family to document her son’s painful abandonment issues while seeking to help him express and understand his feelings.
Thus the documentary became both a personal depiction of her son’s maturation process as well as a sociological overview of what it is like to be a man raised solely by one’s mother. Viewers hear the voices of a variety of men from diverse backgrounds and ages, sharing painfully personal anecdotes and allowing McWilliams to capture their current lives to see the men they’ve become in the wake of emotionally turbulent and unsettling periods of their youth.
“In a Perfect World…” is both a deeply personal and introspective portrait of a modern family as well as a probing cinematic essay examining one of society’s major ailments.
Subjects include:
Patrice Gerard: Now a NYC firefighter, he was born and raised in Brooklyn by a first-generation American mother of West-Indian decent, who never failed to tell him that she loved him and gave him the foundation for being compassionate and empathetic.
Ned: His father’s absence during his youth did not diminish Ned’s strong sense of self and “anything is possible attitude” and he has become a prominent artist.
Kevin: Having never met his father nor anyone from his father’s family, he was raised by a single mother in Hell’s Kitchen in NYC. From his early life, he would never have predicted his now successful career at the Pentagon.
