Slay Down began with a conversation. Three years ago, a friend recounted her experience acting at a summer stock theatre: overworked, underpaid, and subject to the whims of an abusive artistic team. 

That story stayed with writer/director Jessica Levin, who began imagining a narrative that captured the essence of the rehearsal process: the chaos, the exploitation, the absurdity, but also the deep passion that keeps artists coming back for more.

Created by a team of theatre kids turned filmmakers, Slay Down merges the immediacy of live performance with the visual language of film. This short serves as a proof of concept for a feature-length film. 

The arts are under attack. Funding is being pulled, content is being censored, and artists are being pressured to churn out reboots - lest they be replaced by AI! Independent filmmaking feels nearly impossible right now...but we're doing it anyway.
 

Beneath the blood and comedy, Slay Down is rooted in real experiences of artists navigating systems that fail to support them - who continue to create, in spite of it all. I am making this film with a network of emerging artists, and this project is as much about creating opportunity for us as it is about telling this story. 

Public exhibition is a central component of the project. Live theatre is best enjoyed with a live audience, and the movie-watching experience should ideally maintain that communal element.

Thus! The film will be screened primarily through community-based programming. We are partnering with the Neighborhood Film Festival and Shorts Movie Theater, the first-ever cinema dedicated exclusively to short films. 

The long-term goal is to use this short to generate interest, partnerships, and financing for the full-length film, which will further develop the world, music, and characters introduced here. 

In order to bring this film to life, we have to raise $20,000. This money will go directly toward our production, specifically to paying, housing, and feeding our cast and crew.

As independent filmmakers making original work outside the studio system, we are relying on the support of our community.

At its core, this film is about the fine line between devotion and obsession (and the people who can't tell the difference). It's a love letter to working artists written in our own blood. Thank you for your support. We're so excited to bring this wild thing to life!