GLASS (2017)
GLASS tells the story of a young girl, raised in complete isolation, by her mother. At the age of eleven she is taken, in the night, to a place that makes no sense to her. It is a void within which she tries to protect her memories, her only way of reconnecting with the idea and feeling of home. Her only way back.
I began work on GLASS in 2012, while my last film, THE GOLDEN HOUR, was still in production. Memory is a common theme in my work and I became interested in the idea of a person waking up in a strange place and attempting to retrace the steps that may have been taken to come to this place. From here, it evolved to an exploration of the re-writing of memory over time and the fear of losing oneself in the process. How much could one lose and still remain the same person? How hardwired are these memories? It then continued growing into a story of a woman attempting, desperately, to protect her fading memories from an unknown source which is working to wipe them away.
GLASS began its life as a short film and, during the process of postproduction, revealed itself to be a feature, almost dictating the terms of its own existence. The end result is a story about the very nature of storytelling and the familial cycle of passing things down so that they might endure. The idea that the story changes hands, rather than ending. It is, first and foremost, the love story of a mother and her child and the many iterations of herself over time.
Winner of BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE | Reading Film Festival | 2017 *
One of the Fan Favorites of the 2017 festival. Jason R. Gray comments on filmmaking and the festival.
“What dId you see…”
“mom wrote me stories…”
“She made everything about them.”
“She said that, in my dreams, I would have space…”
“So much more space than we had in our house.”
“She made the world bigger for me.”
“We stayed out late. The sun never seemed to set…”
“I felt so safe…”
“With mom holding me against her…”
“She looked at me.”
“I remember her eyes…”
“She said I had her eyes…”
“I miss the way things were. Wish I could go back. EVERYTHING, before herE, is starting to feel like a dream im FORGETTING, as i wake…
“Do you remember anything?”
“Tell me a story”
“He would never forget what he saw when he looked into the glass. it wasn’t his reflection that greeted him, the sisters who stared back at him from every single shard. The sisters through the glass…”
“I am born again.”
“When you are a child, the world seems so big. You can’t possibly reach the edges…”
“Do you know what it’s like to know that all your happiest moments are behind you?”
“Don’t your memories make you happy?”
“The mirror takes me back to my old life, but im not sure if it’s real anymore. And every time i look back, Im afraid i’ll change something…”
“That’s not me…”
“This other place, you mentioned…”
“Have I ever seen it?”
“Woken up in it, I mean…”
“When she fell to the floor, she shattered into hundreds of pieces but you could still see her reflection in each and every piece. They could not destroy her…”
“What happens after the ring glows red?”
“Tell me how it ends…”
One sheet — Jason R. Gray | Variant 1 — Melissa Parrott | Variant 2 — Sarah Legault
Official Release One Sheet | 2021 — Jason R. Gray
