Skinny-dipping and bedding your college professor — oh, it’s just another summer in New England, that’s all.
Liz Garcia’s teenage drama One Percent More Humid follows two college-aged childhood best friends Iris (Juno Temple) and Catherine (Julia Garner) who’ve experienced something horrible in their past and are looking to recover from it amid flea markets, lake swims, and respective forbidden affairs with a married college professor (Alessandro Nivola) and a former crush-turned-enemy.
Andreas Burgess
Garcia knows something about troubled teens having served as a writer on Dawson’s Creek as well as having directing and wrote Kristen Bell indie feature The Lifeguard about a New York reporter who quits her job, returns to her childhood home in Connecticut and starts up an affair with a troubled teen. In Temple and Garner, Garcia has a serendipitous pairing of soul sisters who have a history of playing girls in peril, whether it’s Garner’s rebellious teen Kimberly Breland on The Americans or Temple’s junior music exec on Vinyl.
Garcia wrote One Percent More Humid 16 years ago saying the film is “something that felt emotionally autobiographical. I grew up in the suburbs, in New England and we experienced this tragic coming of age, losing friends and peers and I heard some stories that really stayed with me about kids who had lost friends and then were punished for it.”
The filmmaker also speaks about the rise in female auteurs, but also acknowledges that the glass ceiling could be broken more.
“People like Lena Dunham and Diablo Cody have proved that people would be interested in female voices and the movement from celluloid to digital have cut down on budgets and let more women in,” says Garcia.
“Female filmmakers can get permission to make tiny movies. I’ll take it. I’m lucky to have this ridiculous job. It’s great that you let me have the money to scrap this thing together, but now trust me with a real budget,” adds Garcia.
CAA is handling foreign and domestic sales on One Percent More Humid. More showtime during the Tribeca Film Festival are listed here.
