Welcome to the first installment of MNFF’s Short of the Week series!
Allison Mattox’s short film, Échappé, has screened at festivals including Traverse City, Newport Beach, and Dance on Camera and won awards at festivals including SF Indie Shorts, Sedona, and Garden State. The film also won Film Pipeline’s Short Film Competition.
After screening at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival in 2019, the feature script based off of the short film won the inaugural MNFF Franklin Film Development Fund. Allison is currently fundraising to match the $10K grant to help take the feature script into production.
Inspired by defections of Russian ballet dancers in the 1960s and 1970s, Échappé follows an elite Soviet company on tour in New York City. Under the watchful eye of Russian handlers and informants, a rising ballerina begins to suspect that her brother—the company’s star dancer—is planning to defect. Torn between her family and the motherland, she confronts questions of loyalty that jeopardize her own ambition as her perceptions of East versus West are challenged.