SHS Graduate's Film Debuts at Milwaukee Film Festival

In a series of homegrown shorts at the Milwaukee Film Festival Thursday, one film will take viewers back to the early 1900s to express the imagination of 2011 Shorewood High School graduate Celia Carroll.

Carroll’s story, Memento Mori, won Milwaukee Film’s screenplay contest, in which high school students worked with local filmmakers to write scripts.

The 12-minute film follows a traveling photographer who mesmerizes his subjects and takes, with their pictures, their most prized possessions.

“I had read something about a tribe in Africa that thought photos captured people’s souls, and I liked that idea,” Carroll said.

Carroll produced the film with a team of professionals, including Director Karen Erbach, who took over directing about two months into the process when the previous director stepped down from the project.

Having never written a screenplay before, Carroll said she tried 15-20 drafts before settling.

“I struggled a lot with dialogue because I wanted it to be meaningful not just stupid chitter-chatter,” she said.

Plus, Erbach asked Carroll to shorten the script from about 15 pages to 12.

“Short films are always better when they’re shorter,” Erbach said.

The film is narrated by an astute, tough young girl who in unraveling the photographer’s tricks becomes a sort of heroine — one in whom Erbach said she sees a reflection of Carroll’s own strong will.  

“Celia’s got really strong character. She knows what she wants, and she’s really talented,” Erbach said. “There is a message that people are mostly the same and not so different, and that having empathy is healing to yourself. Celia does a lot of volunteer work, and I think she’s really interested in the better side of human nature, and the possibility that people can change, and that’s what this story reflects.”

An Advanced Placement art student in high school, and now studying art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Carroll said she found film to be a unique medium in the way it demands cooperation.

“It’s very much collaborative because if you’re on a shoot, it’s not just a camera man and a director; it’s like 30 people working together at all times,” Carroll said. “It was nice, hearing everyone’s ideas.”

Carroll was involved in almost every aspect of production, from casting, to costuming, lighting and filming at Old World Wisconsin, an outdoor museum in Eagle, WI. She even got to be an extra.

“Celia blossomed on the set,” Erbach said. “She was one of the hardest workers there and she was always asking what she could do for somebody, and always smiling.”

The editing, however, began the day she left for UW-Madison. Carroll will see the film for the first time with everyone else Thursday night.

The shorts start at 7:00 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre. You can buy advance tickets here.