ORIGINS OF THE FILM

As I was growing up I knew very little about where my mothers family had come from. It was a mystery how they had a history of farming and less in the way of formal education, and how they might have ended up in Denver Colorado. Many holes in the story, but I never asked the questions. Several years ago with my grandparents aging my mother and I decided to do a series to interviews trying to capture a sliver of what their lives where like and where they came from, the experiences that color my history. I was taken by the volume of stories that didn't seem to fit into my 2000s psychology. When my grandfather was a child his brothers, his father and him would shoot squirrels quite frequently with their 22 rifle. This was not done for childhood sport but rather to survive. Another time later his family even managed to capture a cat for supper. A different set of concerns all together. As we continued to talk bizarre stories of physical and emotional survival continued to surface. I took interest.

In 1926 my grandmother Lucille Creed was born onto a small farm in Northern Indiana. When she was five years old her father Wilber Chambers died from Tuberculosis. Three years later when Lucille was 8, her mother Florence died of Tuberculosis. Orphans, my grandmother and her younger sister and brother Dorothy and Leonard lived for a short period of time in fear that they might be incorporated into a system of foster care that was gaining credibility. This system was generally known as the "Orphan Train". Essentially a program that found orphan children and assigned them to families thoughout the midwest to Texas. Many times children who found their way onto these trains were split up and became cheap labor for struggling farms.

My grandmother and her siblings were fortunate enough to be taken into the home of their grandmother, but the absence of their parents made a strong impact on the remainder of their lives. As children in the agricultural realm of the depression they bore witness to the industrialization of the farming industry, and the decline of the subsistence homestead farmer. In this relatively short period of time they lived though the need to implement social security, a mass exodus of the rural landscape, and an a great adjustment to changing economic times.

Many people know at least a little bit about what The Great Depression, coupled with frenzied land speculation and over consumption did to the American farmer. In the heart of the midwest when these factors met with the downward swing of growth and drought, the consequences fractured the identity of the family farmer. This cultural and ecological phenomenon later became known as The Dust Bowl. Although Lucille did not live in Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, or Oklahoma at the time, much of the emotional experience she lived was a shared experience for what families in the aforementioned states had lived. Stories of farm foreclosures, poverty, and migration westward are generally the narrative that emanates from this time period, but they were all of them preceded by smaller events within the family unit as they fought to dig in and show allegiance to their land and lifestyle or take their chances on another round of speculation promoting work farther west. Most of everyone didn't have much of anything, and people were in a place they couldn't stay without the ability to go anywhere else.

For the heads of a family, these conditions were a known calamity. For their children, it was just life as normal.

This is the moment in which "THE LITTLE HORSE" lives. Inspired by the conversations with my grandmother Lucille, I am creating a film that will give life to what the family experience looked like for some families pushed to their limit. This film is a story of survival and growth, where many times life calls us to grow up far before we are ready to. Standing up to that call is never easy, as the lead character Caroline experiences.

My hope is that over the next year as this film grows it will show viewers an emotional place that many Americans came from and how they grew up. I'd like to remind us that especially amongst hard times, we have no choice but to survive.

SYNOPSIS

"THE LITTLE HORSE" is a film about three young children who are faced with survival as they find themselves alone on their Texas farm when their mother never returns from a routine supply trip. Amidst the drought of the 1930s Depression era, the children have to provide for each other in ways far beyond their maturity. In order to pacify her younger siblings, the eldest sister Caroline embellishes a lie about the family's acquisition of a little horse. The weight of this lie grows with the continued absence of their mother which pushes Caroline to introduce her brother and sister to the hollowing nature of their reality... or prove up on her story. Neither of which she can bring herself to do.