Five Tribes raising money to make benefit film short

OCHS grads in production company want to support front-line workers

By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff

OCEAN CITY – A production company run by “a bunch” of Ocean City High School graduates is raising money to produce a short film they hope will, in turn, raise money for front-line workers in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Colin Stewart, a recent Drexel University graduate, and his mates at Five Tribes Cinema Productions are producing a three-minute-long short film called “Ave Maria” that follows a man whose wife dies during the pandemic and whose death raises philosophical questions.

 

Stewart said in December he had the idea for a short film he had been considering throughout the pandemic. He wanted to do something to assist others, but needed to find something in his skill set.

“I’m a hands-on kind of person wanting to help people out. When the world was shutting down and hospitals were overwhelmed I wanted to leap to my feet and go to a hospital to see if I could help out. Terrible idea,” he laughed. “I knew nothing about medicine. Leave that to the professionals.”

Instead he came back to his own wheelhouse – cinema productions – to tell a short story he and his colleagues hope will resonate with viewers and raise money for front-line workers.

The short is about a man named Joseph Hernandez whose wife dies – from COVID-19, it is inferred – and he is unable to be by her side when she passes. 

The first-generation American goes to his childhood church “to confront and seek an audience with God and ask, ‘Why me?’

“It’s veiled in a religious allegory but the message is universal, asking the philosophical question, ‘Why me?’ When I was writing it – the ambiguity of God itself, is He real? Is He there? Why is this happening? Is this because of Him? Is this not because of Him?”

He said his grandfather’s wife died during the pandemic. His grandfather “had to stand on the other side of a door as she succumbed to COVID-19. When that was happening, the questions were in my head: ‘Why her? Did she do anything wrong?’ It’s the same philosophical debate in your head,” Stewart said. 

In the planned short, the character asks the questions and “goes through the five stages of grief.” He said “they put a little glimmer of light in there to infer that she is there with him. We didn’t want to make a completely depressing type of film itself. It is a brutal subject matter.”

Stewart said he and his colleagues chose a short film for a reason.

“Instead of a feature film that’s an hour long and at the end people have to sit down and make it (donating) a big thing, we’re like one click on our Amazon or Netflix page and you’ve already donated to front-line workers. It’s three minutes of your day. Watch it and you’ve already helped somebody out. That’s what we’re aiming to do.”

To donate to the GoFundMe site, go online to fivetribescinemaproductions.com and click on the link for “Ave Maria Fundraiser” at the top of the home page.

DONATE HERE

Five Tribes Cinema Productions markets itself as an independent, award-winning video production in the greater Philadelphia and southern New Jersey area that produces work from commercials to narrative film projects.

The fellow OCHS graduates in the company are TJ Rumer, Greg Fischer, David Laverty and Paul Giordano. Chase McLaughlin is another member of the team.

The production company had its roots in a freshman film Stewart and others wmade in winter 2017 when Stewart was early in his film school days at Drexel.

“We wanted to shoot a short film. Wrote a script. We had time over winter break so let’s make a film,” he said. “And we made an absolutely terrible, clearly a college freshman film – an action movie with no budget, no training, and no professional actors. Which you can imagine went as well as it sounds. Moving forward, making films for class and making films on my own, I needed a name to put everything under, a company name, so as a joke I selected the name of that film, ‘Five Tribes.’

“In the summer of 2019 I did an internship at a production company and saw what they were doing and said that’s exactly what I want to do. At that point we became an actual business that does commercial advertisements for companies and individuals. We’ve done a variety of work for non-profits to sports teams to companies. We also keep that core of our company where we do narrative pieces like this,” Stewart said.

As for “Ave Maria” ….

“If we can do a narrative piece with a social awareness to it … we’re going to jump on that,” he said.

The goal of the fundraiser is $5,000. As of Monday, it has raised just more than $1,000 after being up for a week. Costs for making the film include extensive insurance to shoot in an historic church and other factors. Anything not spent on production will be donated to the covid relief fund.