Filmmaker Statement

My friends (the producers/stars of this short) and I are attracted to grounded stories about small, kind of mundane social interactions with pretty low stakes -- then of course finding the humor in raising those tiny stakes. In Surprise!’s case, the drama and humor is a result of someone’s boundary being crossed and their slow unraveling as a reaction to it. We wanted to put this invisible "thing" we have between us under the microscope and maybe make fun of ourselves for being those people who say the word "boundary" in the first place ... I didn’t set out to write about female friendship but it became clear that it was at the root of this story and pretty inevitable because of my relationship with Kayla and Ellyn, my proximity to their friendship. So there’s a nonfictional element here (ie the characters go by their real names, we shot in my apartment and I was absolutely anxious about the mess it made) that felt natural and necessary to the making of this short.