Where Did The Adults Go?

An intimate family drama, using a vérité lens to explore disability, sibling rivalry and past childhood traumas, while questioning the concept of unconditional love.

Project type: Fiction Feature
Project status: Post-Production
Writer/Director: Courtney Marsh
Producer: Jerry Franck
Executive Producer: Nic Novicki
Executive Producer: Gill Holland
Director of Photography: Maximilian Schmige
Editor/Co-Producer: Sushila Love
Music: Steve London
Cast: Carey Cox, Amadeus Serafini, Carson MacCormac, Samantha Rose Baldwin, Joanna Nava Goldsmith, D'Ann Connelly, William Atherton
 
Email: wdtag.film@gmail.com
 
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Logline

Cynthia, an impassioned disability activist, finds herself at a crossroads as her tireless advocacy remains largely overlooked. Struggling to stay afloat, she turns to her brothers with an uncomfortable proposition: to sell the family summer home, a relic of their departed parents.

An intimate family drama, Where Did The Adults Go? uses a vérité lens to explore disability, sibling rivalry and past childhood traumas, while questioning the concept of unconditional love.

Synopsis

Every year, on the anniversary of their parents’ death, Cynthia, Bryce, and Miles gather at the family summer home to reminisce and have brunch at their parents’ favorite restaurant. But the three siblings have never fully gotten along, and to make matters worse, Cynthia is in a financial rut this year. So when she proposes to sell the summer house, Bryce pushes back with full force. The two turn to Miles for the deciding vote, but Miles doesn’t care all that much about the house: he is hung up on the fact that his long-time girlfriend, Gabby, recently left him to explore her sexuality. Thus, the weekend unfolds with the siblings’ relationships unravelling into dramatic, conflicted fever dreams of self-identity, broken bonds, and repressed love.
 

Meet the Filmmakers

Courtney Marsh – Writer/Director
Courtney Marsh is an Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker originally from South Florida. Her short films have screened worldwide, winning numerous awards and have sold to Netflix, Al Jazeera English, The Atlantic, and Gunpowder & Sky. Her documentary short film Chau, Beyond the Lines was nominated for an Academy Award® and screened for the Aspen Ideas Festival, the U.S. Senate, and the United Nations. Courtney worked her way up as a production assistant, camera assistant and DIT, while also being selected for the AMPAS internship and Film Independent’s Project Involve. Courtney is currently a full-time commercial director for the behavior change company, Rescue Agency (certified B corp).

Jerry Franck – Producer
Jerry Franck is an Academy Award®-nominated American/Luxembourgish producer and director who frequently collaborates with Courtney Marsh. Jerry holds a BFA in Cinema from Columbia College Hollywood, and has previously worked as a Local 600 camera/steadicam operator on countless music videos, features and TV shows like This Is Us (NBC) and American Crime Story (FX). Jerry recently produced, directed and edited the feature documentary, Bottle Conditioned, which screened at CPH:DOX, DOCVILLE, SIFF and is now streaming on Apple TV and Amazon.

Nic Novicki – Executive Producer
Nic Novicki is a producer, actor, and comedian whose TV credits include Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos and Loudermilk. He has also appeared in films such as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Marry Me and the upcoming BitterSweet. Nic is the founder and director of the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge, a board member of Easterseals Southern California, as well as an active member of the Producers Guild of America’s Diversity Committee.

Gill Holland – Executive Producer
Gill Holland is a Spirit Award nominee for “Producer of the Year.” He has worked on over 100 movies including producing Hurricane Streets, the first film ever to win three prizes at Sundance. He has been an executive producer on films such as Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love and Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s Until the Light Takes Us.

Maximilian Schmige – Director of Photography
Maximilian Schmige is a Los Angeles based director of photography originally from Berlin, Germany. He completed his MFA in cinematography from the American Film Institute in 2010 and was mentored by ASC cinematographer Karl-Walter Lindenlaub. Some of his credits include the CW sci-fi series Pandora, the Tribeca feature documentary Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road and the Disney+/National Geographic series Cosmos: Possible Worlds, hosted by Neil DeGrass Tyson. He also recently shot and directed DragRace Germany for Paramount+.

Sushila Love – Editor/Co-Producer
Sushila Love is a film and video editor with a background in sound design, sculpture and art installation. In 2003, after graduating from UC Santa Cruz, some of Ms. Love’s past projects include The Sixties (CNN), On My Block (Netflix), Ms. Marvel (Disney+) and Special Ops: Lioness (Paramount+). Sushila is an ACE Diversity Mentorship Program alumna and current Jr. Mentor, as well as a Sally Menke Editing Fellow at the Sundance Institute.

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Contact

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