I am super excited to be backing our daughter Katie’s film project on Kickstarter. She is making a horror movie about what it’s like to be a teenager. Which sounds about right. Joking aside, here’s the premise:

At sixteen, Amelia is almost free of the torment of her cutthroat New York City private high school. To her little group of friends, she’s the perfect student, bound for a prestigious Ivy League college, but beneath the surface things are bubbling over. Since her mother’s death, Amelia’s father’s has buried himself in his work and left Amelia to raise herself. School is her escape… until she’s roped into a cheating scandal with the richest kid at school.

Innocent and facing repercussions, Amelia agrees to counseling and is prescribed Syrenaphyn, a powerful anti-depressant that transports Amelia into a new world of ease. While Amelia sees this new world as beautiful, we see the dark, warped and distorted truth. This film looks at the allure of the escapism of prescription drugs through a completely new lens.

The reason I am so excited about this is because the movie combines both of Katie’s interests: psychology and filmmaking. When we switched to homeschooling years ago, the premise was that it would allow our children to have more time to discover their interests. Finding interests that are your own is hard. I was thrilled when after about a year of homeschooling, Katie came to us and asked if it was OK for her to watch and review every Wes Anderson movie.

Katie has since taken a number of filmmaking classes and directed a number of shorts, including a music video with her siblings. She has also become really interested in psychology and just took Intro to Psychology at Columbia (thanks to an incredible program that allows high school age kids, including home schoolers to take classes there).

If you like the backstory and premise, please help Katie fund DREAMELIA on Kickstarter.