REUNION
Live Action Short (2024)
Memories, regrets, and long-held grudges haunt two lifelong friends preparing their abandoned high school building for a 41st year reunion. Will the care they show each other and their dying town be enough to bring anyone back?
The film is co-written and directed by Lindsey Martin and Sam Dodd. Drawing on their different disciplinary backgrounds (Martin is a filmmaker, Dodd an architectural historian), the two have crafted this story from their commitments to Appalachian community building and feminist, socially-engaged storytelling.
Reunion stars Shelley Delaney and Merri Biechler. Shelley has had a wide-ranging career as a professional theater actor (over 75 productions), director (over 30 full-length plays), new-play dramaturg, and educator/acting teacher. She’s acted in a handful of films and directed the short film Truck Fishing in America. Shelley led Ohio University’s acting programs until December of 2020, and is a member of Actors Equity Association, SAG/AFTRA and the National Alliance of Acting Teachers. Merri is the Director of the School of Theater, Associate Professor of Instruction, playwright, actor, and educator. She’s the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Boomerang Fund for Artists award and has written and directed numerous award winning plays including Tammy Faye’s Final Audition, An Appalachian Christmas Carol, Occupation, and Real Girls Can’t Win and guest-starred on episodes of Judging Amy, E.R., and Murphy Brown. She appeared in Tantrum Theater’s production of The Cake.
About the Production: Reunion is a story of care and mutual aid between two child-free, senior women living in a small Appalachian town. Sam and I are deeply committed to community-accountability in our practices. This principle has guided the project at every stage.
The cast and crew are comprised of students and faculty from Ohio University’s College of Fine Arts. We asked students to reflect upon their own experiences and backgrounds, value systems, and biases as they pertain to the work at hand: storytelling (especially stories about and with Appalachian communities), working inter-generationally (both actors are over the age of 60), and showcasing the assets of our region.
The film was shot completely on location at the former Rome-Caanan School (now Federal Valley Resource Center, FVRC), in Stewart, Ohio. While the story deals with themes of loss, its storyline showcases an asset-driven attention to care, mutual aid, and love shown between friends, neighbors, and communities. Reunion takes seriously the importance of sites and community organizations like the Federal Valley Resource Center- the building that inspired the film and hope the production model and final film represents community-based preservation work, like the work of FVRC, with integrity. We also intentionally directed material resources to our community by paying rental and production fees directly to local businesses. Part of our goal was to demonstrate, for our students, two aspects of community-accountable engagement: both representational and material accountability to Appalachian storytelling.
We could not have done so without the support of The Film/Video Studio Residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio University’s College of Fine Arts Professional Development grant and Experiential Learning Stewardship grant.
