“Murmur” has been named as the winner of Slamdance Film Festival’s Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize. The fest’s awards were announced at a ceremony held Thursday, Deadline reports.
Described as a “richly detailed and deeply humane drama” by jurors, “Murmur” marks Heather Young’s feature directorial debut. The pic follows Donna (Shan MacDonald), a lonely older woman who is forced to do community service at an animal shelter after being convicted of a DUI.
“Murmur” made its world premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
“I began to develop the idea for ‘Murmur’ after completing the short film ‘Howard and Jean’ in 2014, which was a documentary/fiction hybrid about my mother and her relationship with her elderly chihuahua,” Young told us. “That short film told a quiet story of an older woman who begins to experience severe anxiety and isolates herself inside her small basement apartment. With no one else to turn to, she relies on the constant companionship of her small dog for her comfort and social outlet.”
After making the short, Young began to ask herself what would happen if she took the idea further, “and began to develop the story of a woman who has made mistakes in her life that have severed her connections to family and friends, and in an acute state of loneliness, she turns to animals for companionship.”
Young drew on her own experiences working in an animal shelter and a doggy daycare to tell the story.
Ahead of the “Murmur’s” TIFF premiere, Young emphasized that she hopes audiences “feel a deep empathy and understanding for Donna,” and they’ll “acknowledge that they went on this emotional journey with an older female character, which is an unusual and underrepresented protagonist in cinema.”
Other winners out of Slamdance include Joanna Vasquez Arong’s “To Calm the Pig Inside,” an exploration of personal and collective trauma in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, and Adinah Dancyger’s “Moving,” the story of one woman’s attempt to transport an old mattress into her new walk-up apartment. The former took home the Documentary Shorts Grand Jury Prize and the latter the Narrative Shorts Grand Jury Prize.
