Help us close our budget gap! We are excited to announce that we have been awarded a $2,500 grant from Emerson College. Along with our other fundraising initiatives, we have almost reached our budget goal of $5,000. However, we still need your help to reach the finish line. Please consider donating to help bring this project to life.

View pitch deck here

Logline:

A miserable Boston tour guide is forced to reckon with his son’s death upon the arrival of an inter-dimensional creature visible only to him.

Synopsis:

DAISY begins 5 years ago, as Ben (45) gives a guided tour of the Boston Freedom trail, dressed in full Revolutionary War regalia. On his way home from work, he speaks with his 10 year-old son, Linus, on the phone, and the two agree to race home to celebrate a good grade in history class. Ben arrives home first and loses track of time while baking Linus a cake and watching TV. He finally opens his phone to find 20 missed calls– his ex-wife informs him that Linus was hit by a car on his way to Ben’s house.

5 years later, Ben is morbidly depressed and contemplating suicide. Every day, he goes to work, gives a historical tour of Boston to a bunch of bored tourists, goes home, and falls asleep in front of the TV. Every night, the sounds of the TV creep into Ben’s nightmares which torture him with the idea that he could have prevented his son’s death.

When a creature, half-human half-flower, with green winding limbs and a school-bus-yellow face nestled in red petals, knocks on Ben’s door one night, Ben begins to think he’s finally lost his mind. As hard as Ben tries to make the Flower go away, it continues showing up everywhere he goes, waiting all night long at his front door.

On the five year anniversary of his son’s death, Ben finally breaks and snaps at a group of rude tourists. He is promptly fired, and spends the night drinking in the park. He drunkenly reveals his guilt, regret, and shame to the Flower. The Flower then leads him on a strange and winding tour of the city which ends in a dance club Ben reluctantly follows the flower in. The two dance together. At dawn, they leave. The Flower opens a portal to its dimension, offering Ben a way out of this world. Ben politely declines, and they go their separate ways.

When Ben arrives home, he opens the curtains, finally letting the light into his space and exposing a wall of pictures of Linus. Among them is an old birthday card Linus had made him as a child. On it, Linus had drawn a picture of a red and yellow flower with a face in the middle– a childlike, scribbled representation of the creature with whom we’ve become familiar– and written ‘Dear Daddy. I love you.’

Aesthetic Statement:

The Flower is a figure of Ben’s imagination pulled from his son’s drawing. It represents a deep grief and guilt that Ben has suppressed and refused to deal with or overcome, bearing it as punishment for the death of his son. Ben is complex because even though his deepest desire is connection and love, he isolates himself out of guilt and fear of heartbreak. I imagined the outer world of this film to reflect Ben’s inner world. He works as a tour guide talking about the Revolutionary war and painting an idyllic picture of Boston and its historical significance. Yet the actual imagery of the city– from Ben’s neighborhood which borders a factory-ridden, post-industrial Bostonian landscape, to the grotesque and uninterested tourists, to his skeevy boss– points to a world that is dark and cynical, where there is no beauty. The Flower shows him that the light of this world is in other people, and that by isolating himself, Ben is shutting that light out.

Aesthetically, I am really excited about taking two surreal subjects– a man dressed as a Revolutionary War soldier and a Flower creature, and propping them up against an everyday, working class, 2024 backdrop. I want an audience to be able to see how strange this pair is, but also (more importantly) how strange and grotesque the world is from Ben’s point of view. I am interested in drawing light to the absurdity of the mundane and approaching a dark and tragic topic under a layer of fantasy.

Director's Statement:

At its core, DAISY is about the mind’s response to trauma and loss. While the Flower is a whimsical and odd figure of Ben’s imagination, it is also a physical manifestation– even a ghost– of his son. Ben begins by trying to shove any thought of his son away. He then accepts and even grows accustomed to the presence of his son’s memory. Lastly, he is able to let go and forgive himself.

I, like most other people, am always most deeply moved and saddened by stories of familial loss, whether in my own family or those close to me. One of my most formative experiences as a child was witnessing my mother overcoming the death of her mother. It was the first time I saw her as just another person rather than the titanic, supreme leader I knew as my mom. Much of my writing explores a coming-of-age uncertainty and lost-ness experienced later on in life. Ben’s is a story of guilt, uncertainty, loneliness, but ultimately of healing and forgiveness.

Before transferring to Emerson and often in addition to my work in film, I was a waitress. Working six years in the service industry taught me a dark sense of humor and an often cynical view on people’s behavior– especially those paying for a service. I instilled this cynicism in Ben in his disdain for his job and his alienation from the world around him at large.

In addition, like many other people my age, I am experiencing a deep cynicism and disillusionment at the state of the U.S., a mighty empire crumbling from the inside. The contrast between Ben’s revolutionary war outfit and the post-industrial world around him will cast a dark humor around Ben’s character. The conflict in this story is thus not only between Ben and his imagination, but also between Ben and the world around him; searching for light and love in a world that only seems to get darker.

Mia:

Having just transferred to Emerson college after five years of living in Haifa, Palestine, Mia is an untraditional student with an untraditional life experience. She began working in film in 2020 when she was hired by Emmy Award winning director Rachel Jones at Home Made Docs as an Arabic-English translator making subtitles. She was then taken on as Jones’s assistant, working on pre-production for Jones’s new film, PODIUM, coming out in 2025. Since then, she has also been the Director’s Assistant on Amber Fares’s film Coexistence my Ass! (2025), which will be premiering at Sundance Film Festival in 2025. While most of her professional work has been in the documentary world, Mia has directed 9 short narrative student films, and worked on tens of others, including on Saleh Saadi’s A’lam (2020) and Borekas (2022), which screened in festivals such as Hollyshorts Film Festival and Palm Springs International ShortFest. In her own work, she loves themes of fantasy, the divine, and the supernatural, tied in with themes related to her own life– family, friendship, anti-Zionism, womanhood, and adolescence.

Bianca:

Bianca Todini is a current Junior at Emerson College, majoring in Media Arts Production with a concentration in Producing and a minor in Business Studies. Bianca is originally from Rome, Italy but has spent her childhood living abroad. She has spent most of her life in Southeast Asia; specifically East Timor, Cambodia, Vanuatu, and Vietnam. Bianca’s dedication to film producing is informed by her unique perspective as a “third culture kid” and her desire to uplift under-heard and non-traditional voices. So far at Emerson College, she has produced five student projects and worked on 20+ student film sets, many of which have been Emerson Independent Video Productions. Bianca works closely with EIV, Massachuest’s largest student-run production company. She is the current business manager which has allowed her to facilitate a close working relationship between Emerson College and fellow filmmaking students; she has also become familiar with the procedures of student filmmaking in Boston, making her qualified to execute this project. Bianca’s work has been accepted to film festivals such as the Silicon Beach Film Festival, LA Feedback Film Festival, Student Los Angeles Film Awards, LA Core Independent Film Festival, and Purple Sky International Film Festival. As a producer, Bianca loves exploring the relationship between cultural norms and expressions of identity. Bianca also finds pride in telling queer and female stories and in uplifting fellow queer female artists.

Budget Breakdown:

Cast: $500

Food: $600

Transportation: $500

Props, Wardrobe, Prosthetic Makeup: $3200

Location Fees: $200

Total: $5000

Timeline:

Preproduction begins: `1/13/2025

Full crew locked: 2/28/2025

Casting begins: 4/1/2025

Cast locked: 5/15/2025

Shooting: 8/17-8/24/2025

Rough Cut: 9/15/2025

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