Directors’ Statement

Midway through Pink Moon, Pastor Mark says to Mira: “We don’t have to live in the stories we tell ourselves.”
Unassuming as it may be, that is the crux of Mira and K.
At the start of the movie, Mira and K have fully embedded themselves into their labels. They’re living out of a shitty van from 1997, isolated from everyone, without smart phones and covered in bug bites. They choose to believe that they’re never going to make it in a world that wasn’t built for them, so why participate at all?
We wanted to put an uniquely gen-z/millennial couple in the spotlight and have them tear the generational conventions of “I am special and unique” apart for each other. And as that happens, the labels they think about other people fall away too. They quickly realize the ideas they had about the south no longer exist, their expectations of hanging out with the cast of Beverly Hillbillies is so far from present reality. Small towns are no longer small towns, they are neglected, dilapidated and struggling to survive just as much as Mira and K.
But as those conventions fall away, their relationship begins to fall apart. They’re not Thelma and Louise, they’re not Sid and Nancy, they are two people struggling with the same struggles that most couples do: feeling seen, feeling heard, and feeling loved by one another. Mira and K are so embedded in telling themselves that they know how the world works that they miss reality almost entirely until it’s facing them down the barrel of a gun. And at the end of their journey they learn that maybe they can’t change the system, but they can change themselves.
With that as our thesis, we are aiming to put a trans-masculine character at the forefront of a story, without it being the defining characteristic of the character or the story itself. Trans-ness, polyamory, cis-ness, bisexuality are all facets of these characters, but not the dominant defining aspects of them. Just the same with our cast of characters in the small conservative town of Worden. Ideally, Pink Moon will lead people to question their own labels about themselves and other people. At large we have become more categorical and bifurcated in our own thoughts. With Pink Moon, we want to encourage people to question why we assign labels rather than try to empathize, why we try to be understood more than to understand others, and why we try to make our way more than we try to make way for other people.