Filmmakers Kaitlyn Schwalje and Alex Wolf Lewis decided to make a movie about Snowy the pet turtle after spending Thanksgiving with him one year. Their short documentary is both an investigation into animal happiness and an intervention to improve one turtle’s life.
Snowy is a comedy. But there also seems to be a deeper message?
Alex: It’s easy to take life for granted. It’s even easier to fall into habits and lose sight of the fact that we’re surrounded by incredible people, each a human-shaped time capsule full of story and experience. We’d hoped that Snowy, an insignificant little thing on the order of life forms, could be an accessible way to realize that there’s always room to better understand life experiences outside our own, whether it’s your grandmother, neighbor, or a pet turtle.
Kaitlyn: There’s also something to takeaway from Uncle Larry’s character that we haven’t fully teased out ourselves. Without having all the information, Larry thought he was doing right by Snowy. On the one hand, he fed Snowy well-balanced meals and diligently cleaned his tank. But Snowy was living out his days in a cold dark basement without much warmth or sunlight. For a cold blooded animal, this was far from an ideal habitat. Maybe the moral is that it’s easy to convince ourselves we’re doing right by someone or something, but when more information presents itself we realize what we’re offering is woefully inadequate.
Alex: When working together or coming up with ideas, Kaitlyn and I very much subscribe to the philosophy of YES…AND. We riff and sometimes it gets weird. We even floated the idea of opening the film with Larry reading from a cue card in broken French, “I am the owner of a small pet turtle. I am being forced to read this against my will…” While all ideas are…
Source : time
