Faced with a big decision, Anaya and her friends must come to terms with the future of their relationships with each other and their hometown.

Director’s Vision for ‘Eye to Eye’

I feel like most movies about graduating from high school are about how much the characters can’t wait to leave their “dumb town,” but in my experience, for kids from rural areas, there is often a much bigger sense of responsibility and even debt to one’s community. I wanted to represent this feeling in a film, without judgement, so folks from places like my hometown could feel a little more seen and understood. So, with “Eye to Eye,” I set out to use the classic “end-of-high-school” movie structure and style to tell a more nuanced and level-headed story about saying goodbye.

I knew it needed to feel big in order to bring people into the feeling of that moment in life, when everything feels big. My DP Benjy Berkowitz and I looked at some essential movies for inspiration, mostly from or inspired by the ’70s. Then I brought on my old friend and collaborator, Will DiNola to create the music of the film. With the intention of blurring the line between source music and score, I hoped to capture the hyper-subjectivity with which we experience life as teenagers.

Ultimately the performers in this film, all of whom I had either worked with before or grown up with, carried the emotional core of this film through to the end. At the beginning of this film, every character holds a disconnect with each other and/or themselves, and by the end, affinity prevails.