(Austin) — A Seguin native will hit the big screen at this year’s 26th Annual Austin Film Festival. Now while she might find herself alone in the film, lead actress Ivy Koehler Meehan, will be looking to surround herself with plenty of support as she and the Indie drama’s filmmakers Duncan Coe and Elena Weinberg, of TurtleDove Films, seek applause for their first full length feature film, A Room Full of Nothing.
Meehan says the project which has been in the works for the last two years has been accepted as an official selection in the Texas Independents category.
The film is a “sardonic look at the life of artists when they’re fed up with the world around them.” It follows Meehan and Coe, also the leading male actor, as they “accidentally will away everyone in the world and must manage their sanity in a state of increasing isolation and fractured reality.”
Meehan says cutting down the script and having basically only two main characters was initially a way to save money. But in the end, she says the limited characters helped inspire the film making it that much more intriguing.
“Everybody else is gone so we don’t have to put tons of people on this payroll for this tiny film. So, their idea was to have these two artists get some bad reviews of their work individually and kind of in a hazy moment after these no good, very bad days, they will away the rest of humanity. From that point, they wake up the next morning and everyone’s gone and so they kind of have to navigate their relationship. They have to navigate what art meant to them, what art means to them now. What does it mean to you if you don’t have an audience? Is it still a passion of yours so those are some of the themes of the movie and then it kind of takes you down this twisty, turning ride of some surprises that happen as they navigate this new world that they are in,” said Meehan.
For the filming, TurtleDove utilized the urban and natural landscapes found in between Austin and the beaches of Port Aransas. Meehan says a majority of the filming, however, was kept in Austin.
“So that’s when we really wanted to try to get the film some traction in Austin or at least in Texas and Austin Film Festival is one of the top festivals in the country — definitely in Austin. You’ve got South by Southwest and Austin Film Festival which are the two big ones. So when it became obvious that the movie was going to get made, it was kind of in our mind of this is where we do want to have our Texas premiere and it’s tricky with movies because lots of people don’t understand how and I didn’t even really either until going through this whole process of how do movies get distributed, how do they end up in theaters, what’s the purpose of the festival and so that’s been a really fun although I would say laborious process of trying to navigate where our film fits best, who it would work with, who it doesn’t resonate with and Austin Film Festival kind of just became that home that we were hoping to get into,” said Meehan.
According to the film company, previous accolades for its work include the Script Semi-finalist in Screencraft Fall Film Fund 2018 screenwriting competition and named as a finalist and grant recipient in the Hometown Heroes Rally hosted by the Duplass Brothers (HBO, Netflix) and Seed & Spark.
In March of this year, the film had its world premier at the 13th Annual Method Fest Film Festival where it was the winner of the Maverick Award for Excellence in Independent Filmmaking.
Again this weekend’s appearance will mark the film’s Texas premiere. The Austin Film Festival runs Oct. 24-31, 2019 where the film will be screened twice for festival patrons with individual tickets available at the door.
Screening times are Saturday at 4:15 p.m. at the Galaxy Highland Theatre and on Wednesday at 1:45 p.m. at the Hideout Theatre.
Meehan says support from the Seguin community can also be shown by sharing the film on social media. She says there’s no better way to support a film project than to create the buzz needed to catch the attention of those attending the festival or those in the business looking for this type of talent.
Festival badges can be purchased through the AFF website https://austinfilmfestival.com/shop/badges-and-film-passes-info/