Give Me the Backstory: Get to Know Megan Park, the Filmmaker Behind My Old Ass

By Bailey Pennick

One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. This year, we decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!

It's hard not to think about how you would handle a situation differently with that oh so valuable hindsight. As the days and months turn to years, it's easy to expand on these replays to full on daydreaming about time traveling to reconnect with yourself and straighten out your future. For Megan Park, this universal feeling pulled her into her latest project, the appropriately titled My Old Ass.

I was fantasizing about something I think we all do, wondering what I would go back and tell my younger self if I had the chance, the writer-director recalls about the beginnings of her sophomore feature. After making The Fallout, which, being a movie about the aftermath of a high school shooting and PTSD, absolutely had to have the tone it did, I wanted to make a movie that left people feeling more uplifted and nostalgic. There are so many heavy things happening in the world. I wanted to transport people to the summers of their youth.

My Old Ass is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, not just as a whole movie, but even within the same scenes. That double-sided feeling of the last summer at your childhood home radiates throughout the film. It's a fragile and exciting thing to watch, and for Park to share to the world. She couldn't be more excited that My Old Ass started at the 2024 Festival. This was always my dream home for this film and honestly it feels surreal. I am just so grateful and hyped, she says. Sundance is so supportive of indie films & is so filmmaker friendly. I'm thrilled.

Below read about how Park made the switch from acting to directing, why the vibe on the My Old Ass set was so important, and what she would go back and change about the production.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/give-me-the-backstory-get-to-know-megan...
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