By the telephone booth on a dark, desolate street side, a weary man equipped with a cigarette calls a hospital, checking on the condition of his ill wife. He leaves her a message: He’ll be back soon.
Inside a seedy motel overhead, sitting on the bedside with a head of electric blue hair, his night’s escape lies in wait.
Thus opens “Love Light,” one of the four finalists and Jury Award winners of the 2014 Campus MovieFest, a national competition for student filmmakers to produce a short film within a week. Produced by the Film and Photography Society at UCLA, the film was chosen to move on to the next round of the competition in Hollywood.
“Love Light” follows Joseph, a middle-aged husband struggling to get a grip on the realities of his life and marriage with a suicidal partner suffering from depression, and Nina, a prostitute tormented by her lifestyle. Together, Joseph and Nina seem to find their solution: escaping together and leaving their lives behind.
As the pair settles in the car after killing Nina’s pimp and taking his gun, their plans take a drastic turn.
“It’s hard to run away from things,” said Mark Ryan Reyes, writer and co-director of “Love Light” and a fourth-year communication studies student. “The whole point of this film is (you) can’t completely leave; you still bring something with you.”
Reyes said the idea for the story took root in the Philippines, where he lived until he began attending UCLA four years ago.
“I was commuting from my house to school, and I was seeing all these brothels in plain view,” Reyes said. “They were almost institutions permitted to operate, because everyone knew what was going on, but no one looked at them closely. And I started thinking, ‘How can these places exist?'”
“Love Light,” the film’s title, comes from the name of an eatery Reyes frequented during this period, which was surrounded by such establishments.
Reyes said he went on to research prostitution in the Philippines and started learning about the sex trade, which he said he felt was prevalent.
He said that although the problem was often brought up in media and news, people were ignoring the key issue, which was looking into the motivations behind prostitution and the underlying motives behind both sides involved.
Out of this curiosity, Joseph and Nina were born.
A few minutes into the film, inside the motel room, Nina’s back story and motivations – her fear and disgust for her loneliness – start to unravel. A short while later, inside his car, so do Joseph’s.
Lisa Maley, the actress playing Nina, said she was first drawn to the character through a monologue in the script which explores why Nina wants to escape so badly.
“The part that stood out to me most was when (Nina) talks about how trapped she feels, and says, ‘I could feel myself screaming,’” Maley said. “That was my opening into the character.”
Through the production process, Joseph experienced some growing pains, Reyes said.
Initially, there was something missing in his character, said Tiajha Nakahara, a fourth-year Design | Media Arts student and the film’s producer. She said he lacked a backstory, and was unsympathetic – selfish without explanation.
Something had to be done, Reyes said. He said he was used to writing just one draft and moving on, but after his script was selected by the club for production, the whole crew helped out to build the story further, taking his draft through a process.
Reyes said the crew went through dozens of redrafts to provide a backstory for Joseph and explore why he’s running away, until they arrived at his motivation: his feeling of inadequacy and inability to help his ailing wife.
“We wanted him to be more meaningful, I suppose,” Reyes said. “There’s some reason he’s doing these things. We’re not making excuses for people, or saying it was all right for him to do these things. We’re trying to understand why people do things.”
Even after the story was set and the characters cast, some of the biggest challenges faced by the crew surfaced behind the screen.
Nakahara said that due to the short span allotted for production and the limitations as a student club, finding locations to film was difficult.
Finding the specific motel and phone booth and expediting the permit process took cooperation between multiple groups, including the motel management, an insurance company and the power of the crew to adapt, Nakahara said.
Reyes said all the work was worth it because of the enthusiasm and passion he saw the crew develop for the project.
“I wrote this (film). I co-directed it,” Reyes said. “But I didn’t make it. The crew did.”