Loud Whisper Productions and Outside Line Studio’s Before I Change My Mind, the highly anticipated feature film debut from award-winning writer-director Trevor Anderson, is set to make its world premiere at the 75th Locarno Film Festival in competition as a part of Concorso Cineasti del presente (Filmmakers of the Present), on August 10, 2022, in Locarno, Switzerland.
The film stars newcomer Vaughan Murrae (“Robin”), alongside Dominic Lippa (“Carter”), Lacey Oake (“Izzy”), Matthew Rankin (“Daniel”), and Shannon Blanchet (“Annie”).
It’s 1987. While the other students wonder if their new classmate is a boy or a girl, Robin (debut nonbinary actor Vaughan Murrae) forges a complicated bond with the school bully, making increasingly dangerous choices to fit in. Shot from an innovative screenplay, no gendered pronouns are used to describe Robin throughout the film.
Trevor Anderson is a writer-director-actor and former video store clerk whose short films have been presented at many international festivals. His work has screened three times at Sundance and twice at the Berlinale, where his musical The Man That Got Away (2012) won the D.A.A.D. Short Film Prize.
Anderson says, “When I was a teenager in Canada in the 1980s, I was often asked, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I wish I could’ve let that question hang in the air unanswered, like Robin does in the film.”
IndieWire has named Before I Change My Mind as one of “10 Must-See Movies at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival,” praising its “soft and transportive ’80s aesthetic,” and noting that the film “seems determined to confront the challenges and triumphs of self-becoming with the unwavering honesty of someone who remembers them both.”
At the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the script for Before I Change My Mind was named to The GLAAD List, a curated list of the ten most promising LGBTQ-inclusive screenplays in Hollywood.
Before I Change My Mind is directed by Trevor Anderson from a screenplay by Anderson & Fish Griwkowsky, produced by Katrina Beatty and Alyson Richards, and executive produced by Trevor Anderson, Justin Lachance, Patrick Ewald, and Nick Adams.
An assured and atmospheric feature debut packed with wry humor and pitch-perfect period details, Before I Change My Mind is produced with the support of Telefilm Canada, the Alberta Media Fund, and Epic Pictures.
