By ION on Nov 30, 2009 in MOVIES
Dusty Mancinelli’s Soap
Dusty Mancinelli is the third of four Canadian short filmmakers we’ve featured in issue#61
Caught lugging around a big, bulky VHS camcorder when he was just two feet tall—Dusty Mancinelli was a kid obsessed with cameras. “I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker, even though as a kid I didn’t always know what that meant,” says Dusty who, at age 23, now holds a BFA in film production from York University.
His 15-minute short, Soap, was in the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Using strategic dark humour and highly tensioned scenes, Soap explores the choices that people make and the consequences of their actions in moments of vulnerability. “For me, it’s that life is full of choices and consequences. The moral of the story is, the further you run away from your troubles, the harder it is to reconcile them.”
With the help of film editor Darby MacInnis, Soap was born. “Darby pitched me a one-liner,” says Dusty. “A woman’s lover slips on a bar of soap and dies in her bathroom.” Immediately, he was drawn to the idea and developed it further.
Eileen is a stay-at-home mom in an unhappy marriage. Her young lover on the side comes over after a morning of unsatisfying sex with her husband. Their afternoon rendezvous has an unexpected surprise when he slips on a bar of soap, forcing her to take drastic and oddly humourous measures to conceal her affair. The response to Soap has been overwhelmingly positive for Dusty. “We had three sold out screenings and a great response from the audience at TIFF, which is more than I could have hoped for.”
After watching Soap I woke up from a nightmare. I was the damsel in distress, figuring out what to do with the body—going on my own series of ill-fated events to conceal my actions. It took a while to get a hold of my thoughts before I could get out of bed that morning and face myself in the mirror. Talk about throwing myself into my work.
The Toronto-based Dusty co-owns a production company called ‘Inflo Films’ and is also a photographer with work published in newspapers across Canada. “I want to tell the stories that I want and make a living off it.” Before he’s 30, he plans to have made a feature film. Keep an eye out for his next project: a film about a man on the verge of dying from a broken heart.
Words: Alicia-Rae Light
