Karen Lam's Stolen goes to Cannes Film Festival - Short Film Corner

THE STOLEN (SHORT FILM) Synopsis Logline: An imaginative young girl is granted a secret wish when she rescues a boy from her bullying brother. Her wish comes true, but at a dark price.

Synopsis A young girl (Essie) turns to the fantastical world of her imagination to escape her emotionallyabusive home. Her father, a veteran, committed suicide after witnessing the horrors of war in Afghanistan. Her older brother (Braden) is now lashing out with anger and violence at the world around him.

One day, Essie oversees Braden and his friends beating a frail teenage boy (Sebastian) and imprisoning him in a cage. Essie rescues Sebastian, telling him she is a fairy princess. When Sebastian promises to grant her a wish, she discovers that he’s more than he appears. Her secret wish comes true, but at a dark price.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand -

“The Stolen Child,” by William Butler Yeats

I have a deep love for fairy tales and mythology, and The Stolen is a direct reflection of these influences.

The film began as part of a short story collection, loosely based on my favourite fairy tales, retold in the form of dark, dramatic fiction. I was exploring narration and point-of-view and this story was about Essie, an imaginative little girl whose fictional fairyland becomes manifest when she rescues a fairy boy from a cave.

The “Modern Faerie Tale” series of young adult novels of Holly Black first introduced me to fairies as Gothic creatures, who couldn’t touch iron, lived in a perpetual state of bacchanalia, and treated humans as playthings. This was as far from Tinkerbell as I could imagine, and I wondered if I could re-introduce fairies as a new form of monster for modern film audiences.

I also found research depicting fairies as fallen angels, cast out after the War of Heaven, but who were not dark enough to enter the Gates of Hell. These fallen creatures are doomed to wander our earth in a permanent state of purgatory. The crow and raven imagery emerged from reality (the park where we filmed the short film is the pit stop/drinking hole for hundreds of crows every day), and mythically, they are often seen as the guards between the living and dead. The idea of fairies travelling as a dark crows was very appealing, like a Murder of Fairies.

When developing the backstory of Essie and her bullying brother Braden, I was influenced by reading newspaper stories of recent veterans from the Canadian Armed Forces. Many of these still young men have returned to “society,” broken by their experiences, but falling between the cracks of our society. Young, vibrant men, mentally destroyed by their experiences, suffering from deep depression, and finally resorting to violence, drugs, alcohol to deal with their internal pain. Their experiences have a rippling effect, like stones in a puddle, on their spouses and children, and on our entire society. We all pay the price of war, and the casualties are not only the ones who’ve died overseas.

My films, usually in the form of horror and thrillers, seek to explore human fragility and strength, against the social context of an increasingly thoughtless society that discards the fragile and vulnerable.

BIOGRAPHIES Karen Lam, Writer/Director Karen has been a full-time producer since 2000, producing two feature films, four short films, and three television series.

Highlights include: The Bone Snatcher (2003) was the first Canada/South Africa/UK feature film certified under the South Africa/Canada treaty. She produced the fourth season of The Creative Native (2005) which received the Leo Award for Best Information Series. She produced the short film Head Shot for Dennis Heaton (2006), which premiered in competition at the Berlinale Film Festival, and has won numerous awards at over forty festivals to date.

Her first short film as a writer/director (The Cabinet) won the NSI Drama Prize in 2006. She has since written five feature film screenplays, and directed her first feature film (Stained) in November 2009, a BC/Saskatchewan co-production, which premiered as part of the Telefilm “Perspective Canada” showcase at the Cannes Film Market. The feature is distributed by eOne (Canada), and released in the US in August 2011 by Celebrity Home Entertainment. Karen’s 2011 short film Doll Parts has been invited to over 31 international film festivals since its completion, and has won “Best Story” (Tulsa Underground Horror Festival) “Best Director” (HorrorQuest), “Best Horror Short” (Midnight Black International Film Festival), and “Best Horror Short” (Creative Arts Film Festival.) She was featured in the February 2012 edition of “Fangoria” magazine as an auteur horror director “to watch.”

Karen Wong, Producer Karen has worked in the Canadian film and television industry since 1993 as a financial advisor, production accountant, and producer. Karen has gained a bird’s eye view of production on a wide variety of programmes, firstly as a financial advisor and auditor with the boutique accounting firm, Ellis Foster (now merged with Ernst & Young), and later as a production accountant. She has overseen the finances on some of the most important British Columbiabased productions in the last decade, ranging from Canadian independent films such as Kissed and Rollercoaster, television documentaries such as Yukonna and Lilith on Top; to bigger budget fare like Disney’s home movie franchises Air Bud and MVP; international treaty co-production The Bone Snatcher and television series projects, such as CTV’s Robson Arms.

In 2003, Karen began line-producing the third season of a thirteen-part documentary television series, The Creative Native for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). She continued as Line Producer for the fourth season, which was awarded Best Information Series at the 2005 Leo Awards.

Karen’s first short film as a producer, The Cabinet, was the National Screen Institute – Drama Prize recipient for 2006.

Karen is the Producer of the children’s series Mustard Pancakes which has been honoured with several prestigious awards, including the Parents’ Television Council Award for Excellence in Children’s Television. In addition to developing Seasons 4 & 5, she is working on expanding the Mustard Pancakes franchise into a feature film. Also, in development are two feature film projects, Covet and evANGELine, with Karen Lam. Currently, Karen is producing her first feature film, Based on a True Fantasy, with Writer/Director Lulu Keating.

Lilah Fitzgerald, Actor (Essie) Eight-year-old Lilah has talked about becoming an actor-singer-dancer since she could first form the words. Her first performances were as a 3-year-old at Silver Star Mountain Resort’s Silver Star Idol. Four years later, it was clear that Lilah’s desire to perform was only growing stronger, and in August 2010 Lilah signed with agent Carrie Wheeler of Carrie Wheeler Entertainment in Vancouver.

Lilah booked her first actor role in January 2011, playing mean girl Patricia Parkinson in the Lifetime movie biography of J.K. Rowling’s life: Magic Beyond Words. At the end of her first day on a real movie set, Lilah announced "I want to do that again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day ... and EVERY day for the rest of my life!"

Since then Lilah has appeared on the television series Hellcats and on the popular sci-fi show Supernatural. Following a summer 2011 supporting lead role in the Lifetime Network's The Pastor's Wife starring Rose McGowan, Lilah finished the year off with a lead role in The Stolen.

Lilah is currently loving spending her days filming with Benjamin Barnes, Jeff Bridges, and Olivia Williams in Legendary Films' The Seventh Son.

Morgan Roff, Actor (Sebastian) Morgan Roff is a young actor, just graduating high school, who has worked on both stage and television, though this is his first short film. He has been a guest star on Level Up and acted on ABC's popular drama Once Upon a Time. Previous stage credits include Claude in Hair (PW Secondary), Little Bob in Smile and Archie in 13 (Awkward Stage Productions), Leon Tolchinsky in Fools (PW Secondary), and the Artful Dodger in Oliver (Vancouver Playhouse).

Once at university Morgan will study engineering, however acting will always remain close to his heart.

Sarah Lind, Actor (Fairy Queen) Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Sarah is no stranger to the film and television business. She won three Leo Awards for lead performance for her work on the critically-acclaimed series Edgemont. She starred in the made-for-television movie Selling Innocence with Mimi Rogers, and guest starred in productions such as Psych, Reaper, Blade, Smallville and The L Word. Her feature film credits include A Night for Dying Tigers, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010. Sarah starred in Karen Lam’s short film Doll Parts, and her face has graced the programs of over 22 horror film festivals.

Sarah is currently a lead in the second season of Steven Segal’s True Justice, where she demonstrates her action-star moves.