The coronavirus-inspired filmmaking competition from Justin Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios, The Six Feet Apart Experiment, has announced the cast for three of its features with talent that includes Elsie Fisher, Danny Trejo and Nat Faxon.
Trejo will be seen in Smile or Hug from first-time feature director Paul Sprangers. The story follows Trish (Chelsea Javier, who also wrote the feature with Sprangers), who after being dumped on her 30th birthday works through her loneliness with help from her online art students, two best friends and a box of homemade self-help tapes given to her by the mysterious “mind painter” Doc Garcia (Trejo).
Andrea Navedo (Jane the Virgin) and Ryan Alexander Holmes (Dear White People) are also set for the feature, along with Christian Henley and Chris Aquilino.
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The Moon and Back will star Isabel May as a high school senior who, one year after her father’s death, discovers a space opera screenplay needing a blockbuster-size budget written by her dad. Equipped with just a VHS camera and pocket change, Lydia decides to honor her late father and make this script a reality.
Miles Gutierrez-Riley will also star in the feature from director Leah Bleich and producer Tessa Byford. Missi Pyle, P.J. Byrne, and Academy Award winner Faxon also appear in the feature.
Eighth Grade star Fisher will appear in writer-director Tyler Burke’s 25 Cents Per Minute, an anthology following six characters who experience triumph, defeat, love and loss through interactions with pay phones in Los Angeles.
Ravil Isyanov also leads a cast that includes Julieth Restrepo and Shoniqua Shandai, Amefika El-Amin, Samuel Garnett and Monique Talley.
Having been shot at the end of 2020, all of the films, including other winners Love You Anyways by Anna Matz and Die Trying by Julianne Fox, are in postproduction and will be seeking distribution.
“We are so thrilled for each of our first-time feature filmmakers and have been so impressed with what they were able to accomplish in this experiment,” says Baldoni. “It has been so inspiring to see them create wonderful art with such intense focus and joy during these dark times, and we are so grateful to have been a part of helping them bring their dreams to life. The future looks very bright.”
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