Alumna’s trailer park film to screen at Slamdance

Liz Cambron’s narrative short film, PARK, will screen at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival.

As the stars of Hollywood descend on Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, one Wright State graduate is preparing to make her own festival debut.

Liz Cambron’s narrative short film, PARK, will screen at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival. Slamdance is the only major festival to be entirely programmed by filmmakers themselves and is held each year in Utah at the same time as the Sundance festival.

“I am thrilled to be going to Slamdance,” said Cambron, a graduate of Wright State’s motion pictures program. “It is quite a feat for a first-time filmmaker.”

PARK is the story of a girl living in a trailer park, drifting through life, beginning sexual explorations and stealing her dad’s painkiller medication. Her budding relationship with an older woman begins to give her stability, but her hunger for a way out of the trailer park continues to grow.

“I wrote a story about a young woman struggling with poverty, drugs and her sexuality because I wanted to honestly portray the complexity and the coldness of beginning adulthood,” said Cambron

Wright State motion pictures professor Julia Reichert said that PARK feels more like a “slice-of-life documentary” than a fictional piece. She also praised Cambron’s unique choice of casting a non-actor in the lead role.

Cambron’s success is even more important given that she is a female director, Reichert said.

“Very few women from our part of the world grow up believing they could be a filmmaker . . . a director, a cinematographer, a lighting designer,” said Reichert.  “There are lots of reasons for that, but the fact is that the world of filmmaking is heavily male-dominated and the number of women entering the field is really small.”

“Liz has overcome the odds,” said Reichert.