In Casey Suchan’s new, darkly comic short film, Janey Van Winkle, the title character wakes from a seven-year sleep to learn that her parents have married her off to a barista at the neighborhood coffee shop and that she’s now the mother of triplets. A nearby military base is being used to test bombs, and no one around her seems to be bothered by the explosions–or her discomfort.
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Suchan, who grew up in suburban Riverside and now lives in Los Angeles, says the story was partly inspired by her own experience as an art department assistant on commercial shoots in Chicago. “The crews were incredibly talented and fun, but it wasn’t where my heart was,” she says. She got some perspective on it during a two-week visit to LA in 2000. “While I was driving through the mountains I just realized, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a whole world out here that I forgot about.’ I’d gotten so involved in this redundant work I was doing, it was kind of mind numbing. But once I got on the road and drove for a while, it just kind of woke me up. And I thought, what would happen if we did fall asleep and life did go on? How many of us live our lives like that?”
Suchan studied film at Northwestern and says she’s influenced by work like Emir Kusturica’s 1995 epic Underground, a black comedy that used the relationship between two friends to explore the history of Yugoslavia. Janey, she says, was “a way to experiment with satire and magical realism on a small level.” She’d been producing independent films for friends since graduating in 1996, and easily put together a professional crew willing to work for free.
