A.K. Espada
I COULD JUST DIE AND THAT WOULD BE ALL RIGHT
Pre-production grant
Funds to be used for hiring a SFX makeup artist.
About the project: I Could Just Die, and That Would Be All Right is a semi-autobiographical suburban fairy tale that explores how mental illness affects us and our loved ones.
Deep in the bosom of Southern Gothic suburbia lives a woman who wants to die. She turns away from her perplexed husband to the suicide hotline, asking her smart home device for advice, and obsessively running in the dark while crying. When she realizes a violent and mysterious creature roams her neighborhood late at night, she offers herself to it and is torn to shreds. But the next day she wakes up, not quite alive but not quite dead either, and not quite sure she can ever die now. Thrust into the ranks of the immortal undead, she must come to terms with her greatest nightmare: living forever.
The horror genre provides a uniquely effective space for people to process stigmatized subjects like suicide by magnifying what truly terrifies us. The only way to break stigma is to talk about it. We hope this story will help other people who are going through darkness feel understood.
About the filmmaker: A Georgia native, A.K. Espada is a genre film writer/director with a background in production design, fabrication, and puppet-making. She began making short films when she found her grandpa’s VHS camera at age 12, and the adrenaline rush of creative problem-solving quickly made independent filmmaking her true love. A.K.’s Art Department background, which began when she worked as a haunted house makeup artist and apprenticed for a special effects fabricator in college, has allowed her to build worlds that suck an audience in and don’t let them go till the credits roll.
Directing highlights include drama short IN SILENCE for which she was nominated for Best Director at SoHo International Film Fest; horror short LAUNDRY NIGHT, Jury Prize winner at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival; documentary short JUST ANOTHER PLACE, 1st Place Winner in Atlanta Magazine's short film contest at Atlanta Film Festival; and LAST STOP CONEY ISLAND, which received 4 out of 5 zombie heads in a review by Death by Podcast. She is currently participating in the Destroy All Boundaries Directing Partnership, led by genre writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer and film writer and producer Jordan Crucchiola.