Synopsis:
Sam is standing in line at the grocery store with his grandson when an incident sparks a memory, and Sam is stunned as he watches the Food Lion transform into the haunting landscape of Auschwitz he escaped seventy years ago.
Our Review:
“Standing in line” tells the story of an often written, discussed, filmed subject, the world war, the concentration camps, the gas chamber and the many told & untold stories. Yet, a chill runs down the spine as you read the story of Sam. How the trauma had held on even after so many decades. Every place they go, everything they see, and where ever they are reminds them of the indelible past. The script is very gripping and will make an excellent short film if the director is able to bring effective transformation from the super market to the concentration camps back and forth.
Writer Biography - Jules Corriere
JULES CORRIERE, PLAYWRIGHT, SCRIPT DEVELOPER, DIRECTOR
Jules Corriere writes and directs a monthly, one-hour radio show and podcast, “StoryTown,” now in its eleventh season, based on true oral stories from the Northeast Tennessee region, which performs at the International Storytelling Center and is broadcast on local NPR station 89.5 FM and streams worldwide and on the StoryTown app. In addition to her radio work, Corriere has been a playwright and theater director with Community Performance, International for over twenty years. This theatrical work is steeped in local culture, and developed with oral stories and histories to develop scripts that are performed by 40-70 community members of all ages and backgrounds as a way to bring people together across barriers of age, culture, religion and other obstacles. She wrote her first play, Story Lines, in 2000, based in Newport News, Virginia, and recently completed writing Life Lines, which premiered in Jonesborough, Tennessee (the “Storytelling Capital of the World) in February 2020. This play closed just as COVID-19 reached the country and shut down live-theater for over a year. Corriere pivoted and continued the much-needed story-based plays and radio shows to a livestream format and began a story-based podcast, which now has world-wide listeners. In the professional world, her work Let My People Go! A Spiritual Journey, written with composer Donald McCullough and Denny Clarke, performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She received the Presidential Points of Light Award for The Whole World Gets Well in Chicago. Her community-based, all derived from true stories and histories, has toured internationally in England, Scotland, and Brazil. She served for five years as co-artistic director and playwright for Georgia’s Official Folk Life Play, Swamp Gravy, and her play Turn the Washpot Down became the official Folk-Life Play for the state of South Carolina. She has appeared in Who’s Who for her work in theater arts and social activism for the past decade. Since moving to Jonesborough, Tennessee in 2013, she has written over one-hundred episodes of her one-hour, non-fiction radio show. Her body of work encompasses a passion for bringing to life the extraordinary stories of ordinary people as a way to build community. She is an ALM Candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard, currently working on her thesis as a part-time student through their continuing education program in Extension Studies. While at Harvard, Jules served as a Harvard Extension Global Ambassador 2020-2021. Her thesis is the current play she is writing in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
Writer Statement
My father served in the military and was also an archaeologist. Wherever he was stationed, he always found his way to historic sites in the area, and I always found myself in the middle of one of his adventures, digging in the dirt for clues about humanity. My father never simply pulled an object out of the ground. Each piece had a story and a reason for being there. The artifacts that didn’t immediately have a story were the best. These mysteries required the team to dig deeper for understanding, until the full story unfolded about the person it belonged to, the history of how that person got there, and perhaps, why she disappeared. When all the pieces were assembled, a fuller picture of a people and a time emerge, and we come to understand it better. As a young adult in the 1990s, I met a playwright and director of a new form of theater emerging across the country, which utilized true community stories. Around these artifacts, an original script is written. These plays engage not trained actors, but community members who carry these stories in their bones. What these two artists were doing felt so familiar. I began working with Jo Carson and Richard Owen Geer, first as an apprentice in this style of writing and directing, and then as a partner and playwright with the company. The experience led me to develop over forty original stage plays over the last twenty years, all based on true oral stories I collected in town large and small around the country, and even abroad. I also created a creative non-fiction radio show airing on the local NPR station (WETS) now in its eleventh season. As a community performance writer, I find myself still searching for clues about humanity. Now, instead of digging in dirt, I excavate stories from living people. Extraordinary stories of ordinary lives form the basis of my performative pieces, either as stage plays or radio scripts, as a way for the community to examine its many different facets. Community members get to stand in each other’s places, reflect on their shared humanity, celebrate their diversity, understand each other’s hardships, and perhaps discover hidden stories about their neighbors and family, all to build a stronger community now. This is necessary art. I like to imagine the possibilities if we are able to work together in better understanding while we are all still alive, instead of waiting for others to discover what our potential might have been, when we are nothing more than bits and pieces dug up by someone in a future generation.
Specifications
Project Type: Short Script
Number of Pages: 9
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
First-time Screenwriter: Yes
Student Project: No