Marina Benitez Lazzarottos story can be told in countless restaurants across Vancouver. An actress, needing a flexible job that allows her to go to auditions and periodically spend time away, works as a waitress until she lands that plum role that launches a full-time acting career.
But Lazzarotto, whose Spanish heritage is put to good use at Vancouvers venerable Spanish restaurant, La Bodega, isnt waiting for that big break. She wants to create it.
Lazzarotto has written, and will co-direct and act in, Flash, a 10-minute short subject she hopes to enter in international festivals (like the short, Homesick, in which she starred last year, and which screened at the 2013 Court Metrage event as part of the Cannes film festival).
Its a contemporary tale about a young woman with, as Lazzarotto puts it, a wild sense of imagination, who finds herself intrigued by a young graffiti artist only to find her real and fantasy worlds, almost literally, in collision.
Shes hand-picked her crew all of them, like herself, trained professionals scrambling to find available work in Vancouvers depressed film industry plus music by award-winning French composer Rob Coudert, who she met while studying and working in Europe.
With her quirky, dry-humoured fantasy, Flash, she has well-heeded the old admonition to write what you know.
In fact, some may say the shorts key, poster image is quintessential Lazzarotto a young woman riding her bike home from a pay-the-bills restaurant gig, through the surreal neon and glass streetscape of downtown Vancouver, and along the sea wall at night.
But therein lies part of the need for an infusion of cash for Flash. The short requires night-for-night shooting that director of photography Jan Klompje, using his own Red digital camera, wont be able to achieve without bringing in a lot of extra lighting, all of which has to be rented and insured.
The short, which will be co-directed by Rory Tucker a castmate from last summers A Midsummer Nights Dream with Beach House Theatre, he has already collaborated with Lazzarotto on several film projects and produced by Cody Bown (director of Homesick and founder of production company Indien Summer) also requires a few special effects to illustrate the lead characters ready ability to slip from her humdrum existence to her inner world of fantasy.
Hence the current drive to raise funds through Indiegogo.
Lazzarotto and her creative partners aim to raise $10,000 for Flash by August 11 and less than an hour after it went live on July 2, the site had already raised some $400.
Now we only have to get another $330 per day and well be covered, Lazzarotto points out in typically wry fashion. Or it could be 200 people who give $50 each, or 1,000 people with only $10 each.
Contributors receive perks, and also this assurance from Lazzarotto: 100 per cent of everything raised will go to the film you wont be paying anyones rent.
As she points out in her pitch video, Flash is not just a matter of self-aggrandizement as an actress, she is playing another important role by creating a project that will gainfully employ and showcase people struggling to revive the moribund industry.
Lazzarotto who cut her teeth as a junior player with Susan Pendletons Surrey Youth Theatre Company before high school productions with Rick Harmon and Candace Radcliffe also has the benefit of two years training at the prestigious Jacques Lecoq Theatre School in Paris.
And even though theres a certain irony to the fact that her main direction is now film and TV work rather than theatre, she knows the experience informs all of her work.
Im like a classically-trained mime, she said. I would never take it back.
