College Students' Film Journey Leads to Stony Brook Film Festival

College film students go on a road trip to shoot a movie about a pair of twenty-somethings on a road trip. It's just so meta.

Soft Gun, a film out of Canada by Alexandra Bégin, Jesse Kray and Guillaume Collin, makes its United States premiere on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Stony Brook Film Festival. It's included in the lineup for passholders and single tickets are $9 ($7 for seniors and students). 

The movie tells the story of Alex, a young woman who impulsively leaves Montreal in the middle of the night to visit Jesse, a cousin with whom she was once very close, in Georgia. She shows up unannounced, and eventually convinces Jesse to go on a road trip with her – a road trip with no specific destination other than to explore and reconnect.

Bégin, Kray and Collin are students at the Mel Hoppenheim Film School at Concordia University who funded their film with $6,535 they raised on Kickstarter.com.

"In the end, this film is about letting the world affect and challenge you," the trio writes in their Kickstarter intro. "... Soft Gun will capture the essence of what it feels like to be a twenty something with the unbridled desire to understand yourself, the world, and your place in it."

Along the way, as both the characters and the film crew traveled, they and their production team also shot a series of webisodes about the process of making their movie. Watch the trailer here, and check out their webisode series on the Soft Gun Facebook page.

Cult Mtl, an alternative publication in Montreal, called Soft Gun "ambitious and low-key, expansive and very local, in a classic indie subgenre (the road trip flick) but with its own unique twists."