I LOVE YOU SHELLY WEINTRAUB
31 Scenes from a Woman's Life
Logline: A woman hits the road. The road hits back.
I LOVE YOU SHELLY WEINTRAUB begins with a provocative image: a long unbroken tracking shot of a middle-aged woman walking alone to an anonymous hotel room suspended high above a modern jetport. Her hotel room window overlooks a runway where travelers come and go. We hear the dull roar of jetliners taking off and landing. She presses her hands against the glass and collapses. Mystery abounds but not for long.
Florencia Lozano (Narcos) is newly seperaterd and creeping up on middle age. One Sunday morning while cooking her husband french toast (Ana) impulsively goes a joyride to nowhere and goes missing in a series of hotels and motels. Open to whatever comes her way, everything does. Bad men. Money problems. Impulsive behavior. Motels with thin walls. Alcohol and a little weed make things quickly run amok. She walks the razor’s edge between self-creation and self-destruction and for a while it’s exhilarating. Ana views an old Youtube standup performance of infamous comedian Shelly Weintraub, played by Sally Norvell (Paris, Texas) and has a late night epiphany. She becomes obsessed with the famed iconic comedian who disappeared fifteen years earlier. Weintraub, a female Lenny Bruce is infamous for her raunchy, humor has mysteriously disappeared years ago at the height of her fame by committing career suicide on prime-time TV. For Ana, Weintraub becomes her mysterious missing other half that holds an important clue to her life’s reinvention.
Now Ana has a mission to find the enigmatic star. Ana obsessively preps her own stand-up comedy styled after Weintraub’s. Ana fights to convince best friend Flor (Ana Reeder, No Country for Old Men) to accompany her on the journey to find the fallen celeb. Meanwhile sidelick Flor worries that her old friend has become delusional. They soon find themselves on a wild romp together and having an impossible time finding the elusive comedian Weintraub. All the while Ana’s husband has hired an investigator to find her and he is hot on her trail. Weintraub now is confined to a wheelchair no longer the mad diva of radical comedy but an aged paranoid woman forced to confront her own legacy.
I LOVE YOU SHELLY WEINTRAUB, “A Woman’s Life In 31 Scenes” presents a middle-aged women on a journey of independence and liberation. It is a exhuberant stylish film with a unique almost literary episodic approach to story-telling. It is a a road movie, a black comedy and a one of a kind study of a courageous woman living on the razor’s edge between destruction and self-creation. A rare look into a contemporary woman’s life with an astonishing performance from Florencia Lozano.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/492545272
THE CREATIVE TEAM
Lensed by the celibrated two-time Sundance Indie Spirit award winning cinematographer Lisa Rinzler (POLLOCK, DEAD PRESIDENTS) and music by iconic German composer Pere Raben (BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN). and written directed and edited by Richard Kroehling (EINSTEIN, 2B – THE ERA OF FLESH IS OVER, AFTER, CONFESSIONS).
