A girl with uncommonly large ears is bullied at school, but finds solace in her friendship with a crow in the woods. She feeds the bird everyday and in exchange it presents her with gifts, until a violent encounter at school causes their ritual to take an unsettling turn.
Director Biography - Jacintha Charles
Jacintha Charles is a Singaporean Filmmaker and Actress based in San Francisco, California.
Her move to the United States in 2004 broadened her opportunities as an Actress and rejuvenated her love for Writing and subsequently Directing. She loves telling stories that deal with the complexities of human drama in different styles and context, particularly of the everyday people from diverse backgrounds.
Her goal is to continue to tell stories that can make a difference, create topics of discussion or perhaps just have you sit down with a cup of coffee in hand and think about what you just saw.
She is currently working on one of her feature scripts entitled, SINGAPURA (an old name for the country of SINGAPORE where she is from). The story is inspired by the race riots that occured in Singapore in 1964 that tells the story of a friendship between a Malay girl and a Chinese boy during the most violent racial times in Singaporean history.
Over the past few years, she was fortunate enough to have two of her films awarded grants by the Singapore Film Commission which have gone on to play at film festivals including the Singapore Film Festival (in conjunction with Singapore International Film Fest), Women and Minorities in Media Festival and Best Shorts Film Festival where she picked up an Award of Merit for Women Filmmakers for her short film entitled, The Dance.
Director Statement
We wanted to deal with the subject of bullying and mental health that has been a stigma in society partiularly with children at an impressionable age. Everyone in their lives, be it young or old, have gone through some form of bullying or a challenging mental state. We were particularly interested in the mind of a child. Loneliness and isolation can wreak havoc on an adults' mind let alone a childs'. In our film, our protagonist, Iris, has allowed herself an escape to which only she can take solace and comfort in.
With The Gift, we wanted to highlight important topics whilst entertaining and informing the audience. We had purposefully limited our dialogue in the film to let the story, the action, the beautiful visuals (the majestic redwoods of Northern California) and haunting melodies do the work. We didn't want to draw conclusions with the film. Rather, we hope it would spark a conversation and encourage people to have honest discussions about the subjects at hand. Be it between a parent and child, teacher and student, sibling and sibling, friends and friends etc. Our question to people would be - What and how do we teach our children about acceptance of different individuals and their uniqueness?
This project has been a labour of love together with my Co-Creators/Writers, Emma Scully and Kendra Goff. We are proud of the fact that we are women filmmakers who come from three very different places in the world (England, U.S.A. and myself, Singapore respectively) to head this project. Diversity and inclusion is also strongly represented throughout the rest of our team - South East Asians, the LGBTQ community, Latinas, Europeans - we truly are a melting pot of a team as we all came together to share the same vision and goal.
We are committed to supporting our fellow filmmakers of all genders and all races, and telling stories of all kinds from our unique points of view.
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