Stealing the Sky a passion project for actor/director Megan Follows and actor/writer Marie Dame

The creative team of Megan Follows and Marie Dame, also co-stars of the film Stealing the Sky, will be appearing in Stratford for a Q-and-A following the screening of the film by Stratford Film Festival.

The Stratford Film Festival will screen the film Stealing the Sky Saturday, Nov. 8 at 4 p.m. The Q-and-A following features actor/director Megan Follows and actor/screenplay writer Marie Dame. This highly anticipated event is an excellent opportunity to further explore the intertwined story in the film and the process of filmmaking.

Stealing the Sky is an ensemble comedy directed by and co-starring Follows and Dame in which the various characters staying in a loft are forced to face their identity, connection and loss as the loft is slated for demolition. Fact and fiction unite to inspire this screenplay by Dame as the loft she once owned and loved, but now demolished, was home to many interesting characters and stories.

“The core of it is my life. The loft where the movie primarily takes place was my loft and I did rent it out as an AirBnB for extra cash, and I did have a myriad of people from every kind of socioeconomic and cultural world stay there and I thought I just had to write about this, it was just too kooky. The building was slated for demolition, and we had to get out of there. In fact, two days after we wrapped, we got the eviction notice,” said Dame.

“This is a project that has been near and dear to my heart for many, many years. Twelve years. We had been working on it in different iterations, trying to do it as an anthology series. First of all, it was kind of inspired, before the pending and looming threat of eviction came in, it was really something we were exploring; a super-host element because Marie had a very successful AirBnB situation going and she had a rating of super-host,” said Follows.

Although the initial vision was for an anthology series, the story ultimately morphed and into feature film. It had extremely strong visual elements in it. Above and beyond the beautiful human interactions, one of the biggest characters in the piece is the city of Toronto itself: the changes, the houses no longer there, the cranes.

“In the course of taking it from anthology series super-host to Stealing the Sky the world changed along with it, where suddenly there was this housing crisis and more and more buildings were going up stealing the sky, so we kind of morphed it being about that as well,” said Dame.

While this is not the first time that Follows has assumed the role of director, this was the first time she navigated the complexities of the dual role both before and behind the camera in an independent feature. Her style is to give specific detailed direction along with allowing freedom of interpretation. As an actor herself, she senses what her cast needs.

“I’m a huge believer in the detail. My heart and soul is with actors. What was so beautiful was we loved this script, and we had such wonderful playful, fun, interesting layers to play with. It’s what actors want and need. You’ve got the structure but the freedom and that’s a testament to our story,” said Fellows.

“I would also like to add, that because Megan is an actor, there was this respect for the actors that you don’t always have. There was an understanding. There was one scene where I am crying alone in the apartment and Megan knew, because she is a great actress, she knew what was needed and the atmosphere to make that possible. There was a consideration that ran through the entire movie,” said Dame.

Dame has also found that this script for Stealing the Sky has changed her approach to storytelling. With the complexities of multiple arcs and the subtlety to bring it all together, she learned a lot over the course of working on this project.

There is also a lot of humour in the film which is intentionally scripted, “It’s one of the beautiful things of the piece. I think where Marie and I have a shared vision is this juxtaposition of humour and pathos and the balancing act. It is woven into the story. It is the highs and lows. It’s the absurdity. It’s laughing at yourself and all that richness,” said Fellows.

Dame hopes that audiences take away hope. A quiet hope. She wants everything that she writes to end in a glimmer of hope because that’s how she sees the world. The audience may feel that sometimes things are hard, but in the end, there is a glimpse no matter how small.

Fellows hopes the audience sees that they are not alone, just on the other side of the wall is someone else who may be experiencing something similar. One is not as alone as one might think.

“Be open to reinvention. The truth is life is ever-changing. We have someone who has been in a building for many years with a routine and all of that is threatened and she has to change but doesn’t know where that is going. The world is changing whether we like it or not and it’s about how we step into it and who we become in the face of that change,” concluded Fellows.

For more information about the film Stealing the Sky or to buy tickets for the screening, visit stratfordfilmfestival.com.