"Your life is full of love, whether you recognize it or not." - Andrea Moodie (Writer & Director)
Propinquity Pictures' 52 WORDS FOR LOVE is available on iTunes:
SYNOPSIS
When Alice launches her website '52 Words for Love', posting a new synonym for love each week for a year, she inadvertently sends a ripple through her social network and discovers more about her relationships than she initially anticipated.
Combining documentary interviews with narrative drama, '52 WORDS FOR LOVE' offers a humorous, moving meditation on what it means to grapple with the intricacies and complexities of intimacy.
Starring Stacey Iseman, Taeo Soleil Levine, Philip Lortie, Alastair Martil, Keisha Prince. Written and Directed by Andrea Moodie & James Blokland.
Stacey Iseman and Anthony McLean in 52 Words for Love, © 2018 Propinquity Pictures Inc.
Q and A by Blaine Schlechter
Congratulations on the iTunes release of 52 Words for Love. It’s described as a humorous, moving meditation focusing on many different types of love. Tell us about the movie and what viewers can expect when they watch it?
This movie is about a woman named Alice who is going through some personal challenges and decides that she doesn’t have enough love in her life so she starts to explore the concept of love and invites people she knows and is connected to, to offer their ideas about love as well. She starts a website and each week for an entire year she’s going to put up a different word about love and get people to look back on it.
That sounds interesting and very modern.
Very modern. The lovely thing that we see in this movie is that she will not only explore love as you often expect in any movie between couples, but we also explore love between parents and children, between friends, between step-parents and children, between siblings; so we get this real far reaching exploration of what love means and the realization that we are surrounded by it.
You mentioned that your character of Alice, she starts a website, like you said, posting one word for love each week. Would you ever start a website and if you did, what are you passionate about, what would you start it about?
I actually do have a blog, which is probably the closest I will come to starting a website and it is a vegan recipe blog, because I like to make up my own recipes.
You have some great experience on your resume. Is there a particular project that you are extra proud of that you wish more people had the chance to see or should try and see?
Besides 52 Words for Love? Because I have to tell you that this is one of the projects that I’m most proud of. I am just amazed at the product that they created; it’s a beautiful movie, it looks great, it sounds great…the soundtrack is fantastic, the cinematography is so enchanting and Andrea and Jim wrote a beautiful script and pulled such beautiful performances from our actors, so I’m super proud of this project. I’m also really, really proud of a project called Couple-ish, which is a web series that I was involved with.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Couple-ish explores the life of one of the main characters named Dee, and (she is) a non-binary character, and the presence of the series is that they start out looking for a roommate and there’s a lot of love involved in this series as well and the complications of love and trickery and parents. One of the things that I loved about this series was my character, who plays Dee’s mother, initially is spouting expectant trans-phobic and homo-phobic attitudes and she went through quite an evolution, so by the end of the series was able to be very much more accepting and loving and compassionate towards her children and really, really celebrating who her children were and I thought that this show was such a necessary evolution that’s hard for some people to open their minds towards new ideas and its beautiful when you see that sort of model for it. That kind of brings me back to the idea of Alice because Alice really had it set in her mind what love was and throughout this movie she evolved and realized that love is so much more than her initial idea of ‘I just want to fall in love and have a beautiful, passionate relationship’ and that wasn’t in the cards for her but she discovered love has such a richer, deeper, more many splendid meaning than that.
You also work in live theatre, which is similar and different in so many ways. Do you have a preference between the two?
I love the medium of film for storytelling. It’s amazing…the intimacy that we are permitted when we’re doing scenes with other actors in film is really powerful for me. Live theatre has a magic all if its own and you never know what a performance is going to be until it’s happening because you’re not the same person day to day. When somebody says something to you, it lands in a different place in you each day and you respond in a different way than you would. Even though the words are the same, the intention behind them can be quite different; and the feelings and what happened. It’s exciting to watch the way in which a play changes with each performance.
So what’s next for you…what can fans expect to see from you in the near future?
Right now I am like many Actors in Toronto, just keeping my eyes peeled to what our new project coming up (might be). I recently shot a horror short, which for me was a first time acting in a horror film and that was quite bloody and interesting.
A little different than the ‘love’ movies you’ve been doing lately!
(laughs) very different! We’ve got a few different projects in the works but closest to my heart are the ones that are stories about people and their relationships to each other, so I’m definitely going to be seeking more of those out.
52 Words for Love is available now on iTunes as of Valentine’s Day, and I encourage everyone to check it out if you can. Thank you for chatting with me today Stacey, I appreciate your time.
It was such a pleasure, thank you so much.
Listen to the Podcast Interview
https://soundcloud.com/imherewith-magazine/stacey-iseman-of-52-words-for-love
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/movie/52-words-for-love/id1450313926