Serendipity smiles on new filmmaker

[attach]855[/attach]Sometimes everything just falls into place.

Call it fate, serendipity.

Such was the case for Sandra Feldman, the family doctor who became a first time filmmaker with the completion her feature film, A Touch of Grey.

The Yonge and Lawrence resident wrote, directed and produced the dramatic comedy in only eight days with a predominately rookie crew.

Set over a weekend in a hotel room, Feldman’s film stars Maria del Mar, Kirsten Bishopric, Katya Gardner and Angela Asher as four high school uniting after 25 years.

In the film, the middle-age women share stories about their life, experience and the struggles they’ve encountered along the way.

“There is a lot of unhappy middle-age women out there and there’s a … recurring sadness that I hear about,” Feldman says about her work as a doctor.

“I wanted to have a story to show that we know they aren’t alone. We don’t necessarily have the solution for it … but at least we identify the problem.”

Feldman’s says the media always talks about superwomen but rarely identifies those who aren’t being able to juggle it all.

Her film does.

“Imagine the guilt,” she says. “I started to write this down.”

A Touch of Grey screened at the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival and will screen at Los Angeles’ LA Femme Film Festival later this month. A screening will follow in Windsor in November.

“Ideally I’d like to see it distributed … I want to see it in the theatre … everyone wants that,” says Feldman, who was inspired to create a film after watching her eldest son delve into filmmaking.

Feldman the script for A Touch of Grey five years ago, but started to work on it in earnest over a year ago.

The mother of four read almost every book on filmmaking, took a short course, and set to work looking for equally eager people to make the film.

And everything seemed to fall into place. The four actors are all ACTRA workers, making for a reputable and quality piece.

The production crew was a combination of Feldman’s friends and people she had met through her other career as a TV and film stuntwoman.

She even landed her line producer by chance — running into him at the local Starbucks.

As for the film’s location, instead of booking a ritzy hotel room for a week, Feldman turned her father-in-law’s downtown condo into a hotel suite.

“I wanted to learn how to make a film … I wasn’t interested in learning how to not make a film.”

With A Touch of Grey now complete, Feldman is working on other scripts and setting her sights on getting the film out there.

“(The process) was amazing,” she says. “I guess I would have hit some walls and roadblocks, but I never thought I couldn’t do it.”