Director Herschel Faber cannot wait for Miami to meet Ethan Bloom, the awkward, oddly mature 13-year-old character he has been developing with screenwriter Maylen Dominguez for over six years.
Ethan is the star of the film fittingly named Ethan Bloom, played by Hank Greenspan, an actor on the television series The Neighborhood and 13 Reasons Why. The film follows Ethan as he embarks on a spiritual quest, bouncing between Catholicism and Judaism, all while handling a teenage boy's typical challenges: girls, bullies and parents.
The Miami-based film will premiere on April 6 at the Olympia Theater, alongside 35 other films making their debut at the 42nd Miami Film Festival.
READ MORE: Historic Olympia Theater returns in time for Miami Film Festival
Set in the historic Coconut Grove neighborhood, the film is an ode to Miami as much as it is a coming-of-age story. Faber, the director and a producer, wasn’t born in Miami, but spent every summer and vacation here, visiting his family.
“ It’s a piece of who I am,” he said.
His grasp on the neighborhood is clear, from electric scooters to shots of the Coconut Grove Playhouse to a real estate developer father. “It was a way for me to sort of pay homage to that part of Miami,” he said.
He hopes the film will bring people back to their own childhood.
“ There’s this other sort of coming of age universal component that I want people to really connect with and think back to when they were growing up and the issues that they faced as teens,” he said.
For most people, their issues likely weren’t sneaking around a rabbi to prepare to be baptized with a priest against their father’s wishes, but Faber hopes it elicits emotions just the same.
WLRN’s Jenny Jacoby sat down with Faber, who is also the chair of the New York Film Academy South Beach (NYFA), to talk about the film.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The film was written by Maylen Dominguez. How did you get involved and what drew you to the script?
Maylen Dominguez and I both work at NYFA, or she formally did, she just recently left NYFA. She was the dean of the campus and I'm the chair of filmmaking.
She brought me this amazing script that she had written and asked for notes. Anytime your boss asks you for notes on anything, you're like, 'Ah, this isn't going to go well for me.' I invariably had to read it and fell in love with it. And the next day at work I said, 'Maylin, I want to direct this movie.'
What made you want to choose Coconut Grove as the setting for the film?
The original version of the script was set in Coconut Grove, which was great, and that also was something that really drew me to the project. My family is from Miami. I spent most of my childhood in Coconut Grove and Miami Beach, and so there was a certain nostalgia element that really played into it for me.
I went to film school at Columbia University in New York and I, actually, for my thesis film, came to Miami. Miami was so gracious as a city, they rolled out the red carpet for this little movie I was making and people did a lot of really nice things for me. I always told people, "I'm going to come back and make a movie here."
"The Grove is changing all around us. That charm is starting to get lost a little bit. Choosing these locations was a way for me to sort of immortalize that part of the Grove that exists in my mind."Director Herschel Faber
You feature a lot of iconic Grove and Miami landmarks, like the A.C.’s Icees truck in Kennedy Park. Did the setting of the film inspire it or shift it in a way that gave it a uniquely Miami or Coconut Grove feel?
I think the movie is largely dependent on the setting. There's a real mood to the film.
It was important to isolate those landmarks and that setting, because, quite frankly, the Grove is changing all around us and buildings are going up every day. That charm is starting to get lost a little bit. Choosing these locations was a way for me to sort of immortalize that part of the Grove that exists in my mind.
I was really trying to pay attention to those sorts of elements while also trying to establish a real color palette because the Grove seems like it sort of exists on its own, outside of other parts of Miami. Really capturing that, the greens, the pinks, the blues, all of that, that was really important for me.
Miami-based films have gone up and down throughout the years. At one point Florida had an incentive program to help fund films, but no longer. Where is the Miami film industry at now? How is it doing from your perspective as a director?
I think there are a lot of really super talented up-and-coming filmmakers and filmmakers that have been here who want to keep making films in Miami. I think the challenge is the fact the state as a whole doesn't have an incentive anymore. Getting Ethan Bloom made was a struggle financially because the film industry isn't as big as it used to be. It used to be that Miami was like Hollywood southeast.
I feel like there's so much opportunity here, and I know that Miami-Dade County now has a 20% tax rebate for money spent in the area, which is amazing, and I'm hoping that it'll lure more filmmakers back to Miami because there's not a more cinematic place on earth.
READ MORE: Can Florida’s lagging film industry attract big-budget movies and TV again?
What does it mean to you and everyone involved knowing that it's finally going to be making its big screen premiere on April 6?
I am incredibly grateful to the people that supported us making this film. Raising the money for this film was a labor of love. It took us a year to raise the funds for it, and it was really the community. All of our friends, people in the Miami community, even outside of the Miami community, believed in the story that we were trying to tell.
The story is one of unity, right? We live in a really divided world right now. And this film reminds us that at the end of the day, we're all part of the same tribe. And whether you're Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or whatever it is that you are, we all have this common thing that we're on this earth and we’ve got to figure out a way to get along.
The film is set in Miami. It was funded by Miamians and people that loved Miami. You grew up in Miami. What does it mean to you to see this full-picture Miami moment come together in the Ethan Bloom film?
The fact that we made this little movie and we're having such a grand opening for it, and it's being received as, as lovingly as it has been so far by those that have seen it, means everything to me. We can’t imagine premiering it anywhere else.
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