Synopsis

Lisa during the summer of 1966, loves Mick who has just finished getting his degree in engineering. Together they trip through drug hazed days and nights in a hippie community in California. Lisa, terrified of heights, finds herself high on a ledge and falls into Mick's arms on the descent. She wants to leave this bad scene. Mick wants to stay and be a part of the group consciousness being created there. Lisa leaves. Mick is drafted to Vietnam. Lisa is pregnant.

Twenty years later in Pennsylvania, Lisa despairs as her daughter Michelle is fired from yet another job. After a fight Michelle with a four year old son of her own, is hurt in a crash in the next room. Lisa discovers a sketch and a newspaper clipping of Mick among Michelle's art and sets out to find and reunite him with the family he is unaware he has.

Lisa uses subterfuge and forthrightness to force her way back into Mick's life, now a musician. What she long ago saw as weakness, she now looks past in a leap of faith as she discovers once more that she loves him still. Mick rejects her approach but then reaffirms a cosmic link to her and his family.

Director’s Statement

I grew up in the sixties and was struck with how different it seems when looking back compared to what I remember it being like then at that time. I chose the sixties rather than the seventies because it resonates more with now. The sixties were much closer to the conservative Cold War fifties. So the sixties are much more comprehensible than the seventies now.

I wanted to make a film about people in the sixties juxtaposed with the same people when they are older. A sort of then versus now. How have these people changed and what stayed the same?

I read Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and watched both Magic Trip and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest films. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were really of a time of exploration, of experimentation, of intellectual journey.

The Pranksters had a belief in synchronicity that really holds up in an interesting way with modern physics as it explores the multiverse and the nature of our underlying reality. But some people find that disturbing. And so my main characters represent that dichotomy. Mick is comfortable with such a cosmos, but Lisa is not.

And it is also about the music. The music of the sixties almost is the sixties. The Grateful Dead hung out with the Merry Pranksters and developed their sound with them during the acid tests. Acid was legal. Everyone forgets that. I see Mick as a sort of Phil Lesh, a sound geek caught up in the whole scene. So I wanted our Dragonfly song to evoke that Grateful Dead sound as though sung about a campfire in the woods of La Honda.

And then life happens which changes you. So what happens when the same underlying choice comes twice in your life? Do you do something different? Is something different about the outcome? Of course it is.