Professor Paul Chitlik’s latest film, The Wedding Dress (now available on Vimeo On Demand), follows a wedding dress through three generations of women of the same family in an exploration of love and marriage. Set in 1944, 1967 and 2014, The Wedding Dress tells the story of the adversity each generation faces as a result of falling in love in their respective time periods. The film touches on issues of race, same-sex marriage and illegal immigration.
Chitlik explained that he decided to make The Wedding Dress after thinking about the nature of love. At first, he wanted to explore how the love between a man and a woman differed from the love between two men or two women. This led him to further think about how simply coming from different backgrounds can make it difficult to get married.
“This is a story about deep emotions…about the emotions of love, the things that bring about the desire to get married. So I wanted people to walk away with that, when they saw the difficulties that these three women faced because of the people that they love. I wanted them to walk away and say, ‘Yes, I can love somebody, somebody can love me, and it doesn’t matter that they come from different backgrounds, different worlds,'” he said. “And the feeling that I wanted people to feel when they left there was, it’s okay to be in love with whoever you’re in love with.”
While Chitlik wrote and directed the film, other members of SFTV also played a major role in its creation. Chair and Associate Professor of Production Charles Swanson, Associate Professor of Recording Arts Kurt Daugherty and a number of SFTV Production students contributed their skills to make this film possible.
Check out a web featurette about the film above, or watch the full film here.