The Belt of Venus, a short film

Belt of Venus is a gothic melodrama the most horrifying thing a young girl can imagine: not fitting into a dress your mother could when she was your age. Mothers sometimes forget that their daughters will look like their fathers, and this film is for those girls.

Belt of Venus is my senior film project. I began writing this story my freshman year and spent years trying to find the right team and honing my skills as a director and writer to make sure the story came out perfectly. I'm so confident in the team we've put together. We have incredible costume and prop designers, an impressive camera team, and a fantastic choreographer and casting director.

I write magical stories because they help people understand reality better. Belt of venus was developed through conversations with dancers (who double as close friends) about the physical and mental demands of the dance world, as well as the even harsher demands of whiteness. I hope this story speaks to you all with the same urgency I felt to write it.

Chantal is dancing the role of “Venus” in a ballet that her mother also starred in. Everywhere she goes, she faces constant reminders of her failure to live up to her extremely thin, talented, and white mother. She soon learns that her mother was a host for the goddess venus, after making a deal with her that took away minutes of her life every time she harnessed the goddesses' power. Will Chantal make the same deal that leads to her mother's demise? or will she break the seal and regain love for herself? 

Melodrama is often used as a pejorative, but as a black woman, the genre provides a space to eliminate all subtext, and freely present the overwhelming emotions that come from learning to deal with centuries of misogyny and racism.

Belt of Venus uses the family as a substitute for societal structures. Chantal is compared to the image of the ideal woman- her mother Agatha, but she constantly fails to live up to these expectations. One reason being she is the mixed-race daughter of a white mother, and the other reason being her mother has made a supernatural pact with the goddess of beauty which causes her to physically defy human possibilities of beauty. 

 

Details of our budgetary needs can be seen in the graphic below! Making a film is expensive. Low-budget films such as this one, in a way, are even more expensive. This money will ensure that production is smooth and that the film is completed according to our vision. We are being generously provided with equipment and insurance by the Sarah Lawrence film department!