A chef about to close for the night must reopen her kitchen, and old wounds, when an ex shows up unexpectedly, and asks for her favorite meal.

Director’s Vision for ‘Devour’

Our drama short explores the unreliability of nostalgia and the disillusionment of past romances. I remember listening to a podcast– Pete Holmes’ You Made It Weird podcast, to be exact, and hearing insight into marriage: You have to accept that your partner is going to change over the years, as people do, or the relationship is not going to last. You can’t be like, “How do you like mushrooms now, you never used to like mushrooms?” This became the throughline to the theme in Devour. The two main characters struggle to accept that the other has changed. In Devour, Renee is entering unknown territory in her career, so she decides to go back to an older time, something comfortable and known– the old restaurant she used to work at, and have her old girlfriend cook her old favorite meal. But the restaurant and the girlfriend she left are both different now. And her old favorite meal doesn’t quite taste the same. Renee herself is different now. She has a new name, a new fame, a new face. Places and people do not exist in a vacuum, and you can’t recreate the past. Erin is trying to get her life together after her wife has left with their kids, and her once successful restaurant is failing, partly due to her alcoholism. She, too, tries to recreate a simpler, happier time with Renee’s arrival. But was it happier? Memories can be deceiving.

We shot Devour in November 2020, after winning a $40,000 production grant from The Innovation Group of CNY Arts’ Short Film Competition. We had to abide by brand-new COVID protocols while making a film that’s supposed to feel very intimate. It was incredibly challenging to make, but we were very lucky to be able to work and stay at the Marriott Syracuse to shoot. Their restaurant was closed due to COVID, so we had free rein of the place to use for each scene. There was a fire in the hotel the first day we were there, so, understandably, but to my dismay, we were not able to use a hazer, as we would have to block all the smoke detectors. That being said, I think the film still looked beautiful, shot wonderfully by our cinematographer, Jim Powers. I wanted to shoot the film with long takes, on a mostly stationary camera, and utilize blocking the character as the primary movement in the shots. I drew inspiration from classic Hollywood films to achieve this look. As reality starts to set in, we switch to a handheld shaky camera to show the beautiful Hollywood facade fading, as the characters come to terms with reality. We also utilized color in the costumes and production designs to convey the themes of the film. There’s the old phrase “red and green should never be seen,” in fashion, as the colors clash. We put the two characters in these colors: Renee in red and Erin in green. We also had the cigarettes Erin offers Renee, who has quit, be green, and the alcohol bottles behind the bar, all have pops of red in them, as Erin has recently become sober. They are each other’s vices, and also bring out the vices in each other. Thank you for watching the film, I hope you enjoy!