The Snowflake Crusade with Megan Holley
Sunday, 10:00 am, Vinegar Hill Theatre
Director: Megan Holley
Writer: Megan Holley
Cinematographer: Max Fischer
Cast: Scot McKenzie, Leisha Hailey, Kristen Swanson
Running Time: 95 min
In the year 2045, cloning has become a fashionable procreative alternative for the rich, the famous, and the vain. Clive (Scot McKenzie) is the clone of a deceased but revered Nobel Prize–winning food geneticist who solved world hunger. Youthful rebellion and the struggle to deal with the issues of his own identity have taken Clive down a very different path, alienating all those around him. In and out of state-run correctional institutions, where he was subjected to electric convulsive shock therapy, Clive survived by mentally escaping to his own fantasies of a summer camp for misfit clones.
When he is released due to budget cutbacks, Clive is set up with a job as a janitor at a lifeless debt consolidation company. There he befriends tele-agent Marigold (Leisha Hailey, lead singer of The Murmurs), who is struggling with her own issues, including narcolepsy and an obsession with toothpick sculptures. As their tender and touching relationship grows, they dream about quitting their meaningless jobs and producing a television sitcom based on Clive’s childhood fantasies. But when the post office issues a commemorative stamp honoring the scientist from whose DNA he was produced, Clive begins a downward spiral that could lead to his complete undoing.
Shot in Richmond by local filmmaker Megan Holley (who also wrote Sunshine Cleaning, a 2008 Virginia Film Festival regional premiere), The Snowflake Crusade features fascinating characters, sharp and witty dialogue, and memorable acting, while examining important issues of identity and culture that concern us not just in our future but today.
