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!
Let's face it: it's been a rough few years for everyone and it's hard not to fantasize about leaving it all behind and starting a new life in the woods. Mel Eslyn wants you to know that you're not alone in that impulse. When asked about the inspiration behind her new series Penelope, the writer-director takes our always-plugged-in world head on: [The show is inspired by] a call to run away from the modern world. That is a feeling I think we have all faced in moments.
Written with Mark Duplass, Eslyn's show follows a 16-year-old girl (Little Fires Everywhere's Megan Stott) who actually sheds her modern society skin and restarts her life in the middle of the woods. During Penelope's premiere, which was part of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival's Episodic Pilot Showcase, Duplass doubled down on the vision that he and Eslyn believed in as they financed and shot all eight episodes of the show: It was just [about] this feeling that we were having for a long time - that a lot of us just don't feel OK. We just feel off. And the way Penelope tries to explain what's wrong and what's going on with her is a lot of how we feel. And so we just took her out to the woods and explored it.
Below learn more about the thought process and production behind Penelope was like for Eslyn, along with how she got into filmmaking, and what she's always got stocked in her refrigerator.
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By Bailey Pennick
