Children of the Moon festival application fees

A film about growing up in America (in a cult).

Hello! This is Will, Tymon, and Mac. We are the creative team behind Children of the Moon, a documentary short about the consequences of leaving an all-consuming way of life... Three people born and raised in the Unification Church (a cult formed in Korea in the 1950s), all having left the Church in their adulthood, examine their experiences within and without the cult that for them defined the entire universe.


The Movie

Children of the Moon is a film born from the shared vantage point of its co-directors, Will Klein and Tymon Brown, both of whom have direct experience existing in extremis and leaving all-encompassing lives behind. Will spent years in the grips of IV drug addiction (a cult in itself), while Tymon was born into the Unification Church, to parents active in its leadership. The process of making Children of the Moon has been one of exploring how assumptions about the way the world works are implanted, how those assumptions can be undone, and what happens after they are. While the experiences related in Children of the Moon are examples in the extreme, the underlying themes of dealing with a loss and reevaluation of faith (in God, in others, in oneself) are applicable to everyone who has experienced coming of age in contemporary America. The hope is that viewers are compelled to take a look at their own upbringings and ask what they themselves were indoctrinated with.

Background

Will and Tymon first began the process of making this film in 2012, tracking down people that Brown had grown up with in the Unification Church and conducting interviews along the east coast. While the project was on hiatus for several years, the Church’s founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon died, a seismic event that drastically altered the landscape of the Church. Changes in official church doctrine, rival heirs to Moon’s throne vying for supremacy, a splintering into factions, all led to an increasing number of members leaving. The film was revisited during the first year of Klein’s MFA program in 2017. Preproduction for a series of six sit-down interviews with ex-members of the Church began the spring of 2018, when Mac Smullen was brought on as producer. Principal photography took place from August 5 – September 6 in New York City. Editing went from mid-September of 2018 until locking picture on May 1, 2019, and finishing went through early June of 2019.

Bios

Director, editor, cinematographer // Will Klein is a filmmaker from Columbus, Ohio, living in Chicago. He has been a telemarketer, a meatcutter, and the head of non-clinical staff at a drug and alcohol rehab in central Ohio, and he makes films about people and experiences on the edges, to show their parallels in normalized society – universal humanity, as refracted through the margins. Klein aims to make his work tone- and experience-based, and divines narratives through an organic process of discovery. This process is directly informed by his own history living in and escaping the death cult of IV drug addiction in the Midwestern suburbs. Klein’s films have screened at Indie Memphis and Columbus International film festivals, and he has been a guest filmmaker at Columbus College of Art & Design. He received a BFA from the SUNY Purchase College Film Conservatory, and an MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern University.
https://www.will-klein.com/

Director, cinematographer // Tymon Brown is an American filmmaker, composer, and actor. He co-founded Small Rice Field Productions with Daniel Onoda and Orien Longo in 2007. After attending the SUNY Purchase Film Conservatory, he made several short films and worked in post of feature films until meeting Will Eno and Oliver Butler. Working with Eno and Butler, he edited Thom Pain (based on nothing), starring Rainn Wilson. Since Thom Pain, he has written and directed several additional shorts and is in development on a number of larger projects with Small Rice Field Productions. Brown was born into the Unification Church in Richmond, Virginia in 1987. His parents were active members in the church and its leadership, and as such, his childhood was one of constant movement to different houses, towns, and neighborhoods - sometimes more than once in a single year. He currently resides in Queens, NY. http://www.tymonbrown.com/

Producer // Mac Smullen is a writer, producer, and filmmaker from New York. Mac has directed music videos for Stones Throw Records, was a semifinalist for the Alfred P. Sloane Science in Film Commissioning Grant, and took his one-hour TV drama project "MK-ULTRA" through the Sundance Institute's Episodic Story Lab and IFP's Film Week. He graduated from the SUNY Purchase Film Conservatory in 2011.

The film is finished, but its life in the world is just beginning. Film festivals are the primary screening outlet for short films, and we are asking for your help in paying for film festival submission fees.

Each donor will receive a downloadable link to the film, as well as a Special Thanks in the credits.

To learn more and keep up with news about the film, please visit:

https://www.facebook.com/ChildrenOfTheMoonFilm/

https://will-klein.com/childrenofthemoon/