A trailer has landed for Deb Shoval’s “AWOL,” a lesbian romance toplined by Lola Kirke (“Mistress America”). “You need to start thinking about your future,” Joey (Kirke) is told by her mother. Feeling a lack of direction, the young woman visits an army recruiting office.
Just when Joey seems to find a path, she meets Rayna (Breeda Wool, “UnREAL”), an older married woman, and sparks immediately fly. “I am never leaving, but we’re going to have a really good time before you get out of here,” says Rayna.
“AWOL” marks Shoval’s feature directorial debut. The film originated as an award-winning short. It was “a very small project shot in 2010 over three days during a January blizzard in and around my hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,” Shoval told us. “I was an MFA student at Columbia at the time, and I was very much aware that I kept making these little movies that were aesthetically beautiful but didn’t really hold up story-wise. ‘AWOL’ was an experiment with explicit intentions: [my goal was] to capture a strong sense of place and to tell a story that made sense.”
“Since September 11, I’ve always been curious about who joins the military in a country like ours, where military service is not mandatory,” Shoval explained. “Are motivations purely financial? Patriotic? And along these lines, who leaves the army, and why?”
Shoval co-wrote the script for “AWOL” with author Karolina Waclawiak (“The Invaders”). The film opens in New York May 19 and will be available on VOD May 23.
