Last winter, current Communications senior Ursula Ellis was just beginning to write the script for her newest film project. Now, almost a year later, with locations approved, actors rehearsed, and a U-Haul rented and packed with equipment, the cast and crew of War Is Kind have begun the filming process, paving the long journey ahead to the RTVF Senior Directing Premiere this spring.
War Is Kind tells the story of Ella, a 15-year-old girl struggling with the tensions of growing up in a military family and the dramas of adolescence. Ellis, who grew up in a military family, wrote the piece to convey the emotional difficulty of having a parent in Afghanistan, a perspective not touched upon often.
“Personally, I’ve never seen a film about what it’s like for family members, specifically when a parent or loved one is at war, so I really wanted to depict that in a way that was honest, sometimes even brutally honest,” said Ellis. “Drawing from my own experiences and experiences of others that I knew, I hope people will empathize with the character and maybe gain some understanding of the specific world of an army