Monthly Archive for May, 2002

‘CELEBRATION’ CONTINUES FOR WELLESLEY FILMMAKER

by Catherine Foster, Globe Staff

May 11, 2002

Page: F8 Section: Living

Boston Globe May 11

A 6-year-old boy, looking anxious, steps up to a microphone and looks out over a crowd of friends and relatives. He looks at his mother and then announces, “I am a homosexual.”

It’s his coming-out party, and people in the crowd erupt in cheers, shake his hand, or burst into tears. At the end, he looks a bit puzzled. This unconventional 4 1/2-minute film, “Celebration,” has won its young filmmaker a number of worldwide film festival awards and is sending him to the Cannes Film Festival. Heady honors for someone who is only 23 – and who happens to be straight.

Daniel Stedman, who spoke by phone from his home in Wellesley while preparing to leave for France, says his first film is more about identity than sexuality. “I think my film speaks to all audiences, because it’s about the struggle to find your identity in a society that expects that you will put a label on your identity, and then they judge you critically for your decision.”

For a film that’s been out only since August, “Celebration” has achieved fame quickly, winning the award for best American short film at the New York/ Avignon Film Festival, the Teddy Award from the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Audience Award from the Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

Shooting the film took only two days, but casting took two years. “I started in the beginning of my junior year of college,” Stedman says, “but I could not find a family who would let their little boy play the part. I even paid a casting agent.”

The next year he held an audition in New York. ” I rented a studio, put ads in Backstage and Variety, and held what I thought was my all-out audition,” Stedman says. “Two children showed up.”

Perhaps that’s because the ads mentioned something about “adult content.” Still, the 7-year-old Alex H. Krinsky and his mother, Heidi, showed up. Both “were incredible,” Stedman says.

“He’s really intelligent and sophisticated. Here’s a story I tell whenever I’m asked to talk about the film: The morning before the shoot, Alex said, `If it’s hot out and I haven’t taken a bath, I’m going to say I’m a hot, dirty homosexual.’ This is straight out of the mouth of a 7-year-old! I couldn’t believe it!”

Stedman filmed the $9,000 film over two days in late August on the chapel lawn at the Belmont Hill School, which he had attended. Stedman got extras for his crowd scene by walking the streets of Boston and handing out fliers. “That was one of my greatest successes,” he says. “Seventy people arrived on a rainy day.”

They had been lured by the offer of lunch, film credit, and transportation. Did they know what they were cheering about? “No,” Stedman says. “We shot the scene of Alex making his statement separately.”

Most of the reaction to Stedman’s film has been positive, but there are dissenters. “I’ve met people who were upset about it, who thought it was ridiculous, outrageous, who thought it didn’t deserve to be made into a film,” he says.

Stedman also says he doesn’t know much about the psyche of 6-year-olds, or whether self-knowledge would be likely in one so young. “I’ve spoken with psychologists, and they’ve said it’s unlikely or rare. But there are definitely people out there who knew at an early age and who wished that they’d had a ceremony like this. And that is a great example of the ways my film has touched people.”

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com