Since 2007, the Make a Film Foundation has reached inside the imaginations of terminally ill children and teens with a passion for cinema, and brought those visions to life. The program has already partnered actress Hailee Steinfeld with Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Diablo Cody for The Magic Bracelet, a short film by Rina Goldberg, a 15-year-old who battled Mitochondrial disease. Now, a seriously all-star roster is coming together for an even more ambitious project: The Black Ghiandola, an apocalyptic zombie thriller by Anthony Conti, a 16-year-old facing stage IV adrenal cortical cancer.
Conti developed the short film — in which he plays the lead, a man whose family has been killed by a zombie uprising, and who risks his own life to save the girl he’s in love with — writer Scott Kosar (Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Amityville Horror early-aughts remakes) as well as Wash Westmoreland, the co-director of Still Alice. The Black Ghiandola also stars Johnny Depp, David Lynch, Laura Dern, and J.K. Simmons (who appeared in The Magic Bracelet).
“Anthony is an alchemist — there was magic happening all around the set,” Make a Film’s founder Tamika Lamison told The Hollywood Reporter. Lamison is also a researcher and consultant in the the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Education Department; in 2011, she delivered a TED talk about the Make a Film Foundation’s ambitions and importance. Thanks to the generosity of its incredibly talented team, The Black Ghiandola, the foundation’s fourth short narrative project, was produced well ahead of its initial schedule. “It was like a magnet that kept attracting the best in so many people and attracting the extraordinary ‘yes’ at every turn,” said Lawson.
You can follow the film’s progress on the Make a Film Foundation’s website, and watch The Magic Bracelet‘s touching trailer here.
Credits
Text Emily Manning