"ISN'T THE DESERT LOVELY"

Synopsis

In 2026, in a small yoga room in Rawai, Phuket, Julie sits for a camera. The man filming her lives around the corner. He learned yoga from her. She is sunny, talkative, and a little foggy since a motorcycle accident. On the table is a tattered envelope of letters she wrote to her parents from a year on the road, found only after her father died. He never told her he kept them.

The film moves on three clocks. In 2005 she opens the envelope in her parents’ house on Vancouver Island and sees the year all at once. In 1983 she is the girl who wrote them: a Banff waitress who makes money in the summer and spends it getting as far from a white picket fence as she can. She has already been heartbroken once. India is how she means to clear her head.

What her mother reads is birthday wishes, neat postcards, and a daughter who is happy and healthy. What we see is the rest. A trek that ends a romance. A married man in the desert. A family put off a military truck because of caste. A restaurant owner in Mahabalipuram she nearly brings home. A robbery, a lump, a sacred river she describes to her mother as “neat.” She is polite in the letters and wild in the days between them. The closer she gets to a life that would make her mother stop worrying, the more her feet start up again.

She does come home. She does not stay put. The years after India — a job she hates, a man she meets on an empty Thai beach, a house, a daughter, a shala, a body she has to teach itself yoga again — are the life the letters were walking toward without knowing it. Her father lived through the pages. She is still here to say which parts were true.

The film is not a documentary of the interviews. The interviews, the letters, and the journals are the spine of a narrative feature: found paper in one hand, memory in the other, the places still standing where they can be stood in.

Status

Full draft of the screenplay is written and in revision. It is a period drama with a present-day frame, built in the vein of The Notebook, Big Fish, and Life of Pi: letters as found documents, the telling unreliable in the useful way, time moving because the teller does.

What already exists, and is not hypothetical:

  • Julie is alive, willing, and has signed off on the project. She is a close neighbor and has already sat for filmed interviews, including a finely edited black-and-white session of her telling the stories.

  • The 1983–84 letters and postcards to her parents have been scanned.

  • Hundreds of private journal pages from the same trip — the material that never went in the letters — have been scanned and transcribed.

  • Photos, receipts, and other paper from the year are in hand.

  • The present-day location is the filmmaker’s actual neighborhood. The yoga shala, the house, and the walk between them are real and available. The subject does not have to be re-created from a distance.

Narrative principal photography has not started. Financing and a production plan are the open step. The research, the access, and the draft are not.

The Story of The Story

I live around the corner from my 70 year old yoga teacher. In 1983/84 she traveled throughout India and greater Asia and wrote many letters home. Years later, after her father's death, she discovered he had kept them all. I filmed her as she recalled the stories in her letters while she remembered the rest as they were written in her journals. I realized that if pieced together, they formed a great story, and I had all the pieces. So I wrote a script.

Interviews

I filmed hours of interview footage with Julie regarding many of the stories that she wrote in the letters to her parents along with many of the stories that she left out (but kept in her journal).

Visuals From The Journey

I have a database of countless photos, receipts, clippings, drawings and more have been scanned; all of them from the time of her journeys in this story. I also have videos from various times in her life. The thread is strong.

The Script

I wrote a script based on the combination of her letters, her journal entries, her interviews and everything I know about Julie. It's complete, but more drafts will surely come.