CELEBRATION'
CONTINUES FOR WELLESLEY FILMMAKER by Catherine Foster,
Globe Staff May 11, 2002 Page: F8 Section: Living
A
6-year-old boy, looking anxious, steps up to a microphone and looks out over a
crowd of friends and relatives. He looks at his mother and then announces, "I
am a homosexual."
It's his coming-out party, and people
in the crowd erupt in cheers, shake his hand, or burst into tears. At the end,
he looks a bit puzzled. This unconventional 4 1/2-minute film, "Celebration,"
has won its young filmmaker a number of worldwide film festival awards and is
sending him to the Cannes Film Festival. Heady honors for someone who is only
23 - and who happens to be straight.
Daniel Stedman, who
spoke by phone from his home in Wellesley while preparing to leave for France,
says his first film is more about identity than sexuality. "I think my film
speaks to all audiences, because it's about the struggle to find your identity
in a society that expects that you will put a label on your identity, and then
they judge you critically for your decision."
For a
film that's been out only since August, "Celebration" has achieved fame
quickly, winning the award for best American short film at the New York/ Avignon
Film Festival, the Teddy Award from the Berlin International Film Festival, and
the Audience Award from the Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
Shooting
the film took only two days, but casting took two years. "I started in the
beginning of my junior year of college," Stedman says, "but I could
not find a family who would let their little boy play the part. I even paid a
casting agent."
The next year he held an audition in
New York. " I rented a studio, put ads in Backstage and Variety, and held
what I thought was my all-out audition," Stedman says. "Two children
showed up."
Perhaps that's because the ads mentioned
something about "adult content." Still, the 7-year-old Alex H. Krinsky
and his mother, Heidi, showed up. Both "were incredible," Stedman says.
"He's
really intelligent and sophisticated. Here's a story I tell whenever I'm asked
to talk about the film: The morning before the shoot, Alex said, `If it's hot
out and I haven't taken a bath, I'm going to say I'm a hot, dirty homosexual.'
This is straight out of the mouth of a 7-year-old! I couldn't believe it!"
Stedman
filmed the $9,000 film over two days in late August on the chapel lawn at the
Belmont Hill School, which he had attended. Stedman got extras for his crowd scene
by walking the streets of Boston and handing out fliers. "That was one of
my greatest successes," he says. "Seventy people arrived on a rainy
day."
They had been lured by the offer of lunch, film
credit, and transportation. Did they know what they were cheering about? "No,"
Stedman says. "We shot the scene of Alex making his statement separately."
Most
of the reaction to Stedman's film has been positive, but there are dissenters.
"I've met people who were upset about it, who thought it was ridiculous,
outrageous, who thought it didn't deserve to be made into a film," he says.
Stedman
also says he doesn't know much about the psyche of 6-year-olds, or whether self-knowledge
would be likely in one so young. "I've spoken with psychologists, and they've
said it's unlikely or rare. But there are definitely people out there who knew
at an early age and who wished that they'd had a ceremony like this. And that
is a great example of the ways my film has touched people."
