Four Years...
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been almost four years now since Joey and I (along with a number of our friends & family) moved to Virginia to make the movie Josephine. And another year or two before that since Aaron and I wrote the film. So, so much has happened since then.
April 26, 2015... our first day of filming in Virginia. (From left to right, Aaron Carnahan, Alice Coulthard, me, and Bryan Allen.)
Within a few weeks of our family returning to Tennessee in late May 2015, Joey was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. And that put our lives, and in turn the film we were working on, on hold indefinitely as we focused on more important things. Since Joey’s passing in March 2016, I have tried to work on the film periodically. We did a number of early edits and even showed it to a few folks and shared those early versions at a couple of film festivals. But to me, there was always something missing, something not quite right. And the truth is it took all this time, for me (and our team) to figure out exactly what it was. And that was ‘the truth’ of the story... where it came from and why we ever wrote this love story about Josephine in the first place. And once we realized what was missing, it took us a while to figure out how to tell the story of finding the letters (and ultimately my own love story) in a way that complemented the footage we had filmed in Virginia.
Fortunately, after spending some of the summer and all of the fall working on it, it all came together better than any of us could’ve ever dreamed. And thanks to our partners at Capitol/Universal Distribution, it comes out in stores all across the country on February 5th… just a little more than two weeks from now.
The film has a new title. It’s now called FINDING JOSEPHINE and we’ve added the storyline of how the original letters came into our life and the impact they’ve had... along with a number of other changes and edits to any early versions of the film that anyone might have seen. We also have a brand new trailer (see below), that we’re really proud of.
Part of the reason that the film is now called Finding Josephine is because it’s strangely taken all this time to find the movie, in the movie. And also because it’s now about finding letters that the real Josephine wrote a hundred and fifty years ago, and ultimately finding my own Josephine in Joey.
There are hundreds of people who have worked on this film and helped to bring this story to life and I owe a debt of gratitude to them all. For sticking with it. Sticking with us... even when it seemed like all hope was lost. Because it’s not just a story about a girl trying to find her husband during the civil war. It’s our story, Joey’s and mine and Indiana’s... an amazing opportunity to share another small, big part of this extraordinary, ordinary life that God has let us be part of.
The movie’s available for pre-order now at Walmart.com and Amazon. And it will be available in all Walmart stores and most other retailers starting February 5th.
It’s a really exciting time for all of us who’ve worked on this project through the years and so I’ll be sharing a few more stories about the film in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, you can watch the behind-the-scenes video we made to learn more about the movie. It feels so good to finally have it finished and be able to share it.
I came across this quote about finishing what you start recently and could relate to it so much, so I thought I’d share it.
Blessings to you all.
“Beginning in itself has no value, it is an end which makes beginning meaningful, we must end what we’ve begun.” ―Amit Kalantri
