The over-looked caught on film

Advance praise has emerged for Vesto Productions' first independent film Pretender's Dance. A film production company founded by Tufts/SMFA dual-degree graduating senior Tom Keefe, LA/Museum '03, and Jeremy Wang-Iverson, LA '02, Vesto created a work seeking to promote understanding of Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID) through its sensitive exploration of the subject material.

Pretender's Dance is a compassionate, thought-provoking look at the rare psychological condition known as BIID. Individuals afflicted by the disorder feel that they are trapped within the wrong body. In order to obtain peace of mind, they struggle with whether to obtain elective amputations to alter their bodies to a desired design.

The story is about Adelaide, an aspiring dancer who enters into a relationship with a young man, Sebastian, who suffers from BIID. The plot revolves around Adelaide's decision to incorporate Sebastian's condition into an audition piece for the highly competitive NYU dance school. "The dancer," Keefe said, "is much like myself, an artist intrigued by this curious condition."

After screening the rough cut of Pretender's Dancer at the SMFA Student Review Board for Keefe, faculty had high acclaim for the film. "Tom has created a powerful narrative, visually and script-wise, that creates a story that is spare, economical, and beautifully told," museum faculty member Susan Stark said. Along with the accolades from the SMFA, Pretender's Dance received praise from within the Tufts community. Notably, Tufts University granted Keefe honors on the film as his senior thesis. "Original in theme, masterful in composition, Pretender's Dance suggests that Tom Keefe is a young filmmaker with a real future," said drama professor Laurence Senelick.

The journey involved in creating this film commanded an incredible amount of dedication on the parts of Keefe and Wang-Iverson. "This project has been an enormous physical, emotional, and spiritual challenge with more obstacles than you could imagine along the way. It is completely to Tom's credit that we've done so well and I'm delighted to say it's only the beginning," remarked Wang-Iverson.

Vesto Productions began as an academic/creative collaboration between Keefe and Wang-Iverson while enrolled in Professor Ken Olum's class, Astronomy 10. They developed a friendship while creating a series of educational videos for the class including a fictionalized account of the life of Vesto Slipher, an astronomer from whom the company derived its namesake. Vesto Productions' first substantial work was the well-received President Bacow Inauguration video, based on the style of a documentary shown at the Academy Awards.

Encouraged by the success of the inauguration video, the pair soon decided to develop a "film for film's sake." Keefe came upon the idea for a film when his brother showed him an article on BIID in Atlantic Monthly while on a plane ride home to his native Wisconsin. After he convinced Wang-Iverson of the merit of such a work, they began intensive research to develop a fuller understanding of the disorder by contacting the author of the article, Gregg M. Furth, Ph.D., a Jungian psychoanalyst. Furth was impressed by their open-mindedness concerning BIID. In a letter endorsing Vesto's project, Furth stated that he views the project as an opportunity to "educate the medical, therapeutic, and lay public about the syndrome." After securing a $5,000 grant based on their film proposal from the Provost's Office, Keefe and Wang-Iverson began pre-production on their film.

To give his characters more depth and to continue developing the script, Keefe turned to friend and fellow screenwriter Alex Reeves, A '03. An English major with a talent for creating realistic dialogue, Reeves became an integral third piece of the Pretender's Dance production. With his presence, the group fell into defined roles. The team coalesced with Keefe as the director, Wang-Iverson as producer, and Reeves as the writer.

"Our partnership was based on Tom seeing images and me hearing the dialogue," said Reeves. As the writer, he created the characters' voices, paying close attention to the complex emotional quality of the film. To finalize the script, Reeves penned his own version and interwove it with the original. Pretender's Dance emerged as a project rich in visual aesthetic with a strong narrative structure revolving around natural dialogue. Using this dialogue, Reeves helped Keefe realize his intense, visual concepts. Deciding they worked together well as a team, Keefe and Reeves also co-taught an Explorations class this past fall through the Ex-College, fittingly entitled "Making the American Independent Film." A few adventurous first-year students from their class even became involved in the Pretender's Dance project as on set production assistants.

With the crew and actors finally gathered, Pretender's Dance began shooting on Feb. 13, 2003. In below-freezing temperatures, the intrepid filmmakers met on Beaver Pond in Medford to shoot an ice-fishing scene. As the crew dealt with numb fingers and toes, a feeling of excitement was still tangible.

After wrapping up on that first frigid day, Keefe and Wang-Iverson were invigorated by finally watching their vision materialize before them. "It was hard work, but the kind that I wanted to wake and do the next morning," Keefe said. Filming continued throughout February and March with shooting at such diverse locations as the Massachusetts coastline, the abandoned Dogtown, and various locales within Rockport and Cambridge, including the home of Tufts English professor Jonathan Strong, Wang-Iverson's former advisor.

Once filming wrapped in mid-March, Keefe began the arduous task of editing more than ten hours of footage down to a concise, but compelling 20-minute short. This required transferring the film from its original Super 16mm format to digital video. After about a month of intense daily editing, Keefe emerged with a rough-cut Pretender's Dance.

Wang-Iverson and Keefe plan to have the first public showing of Pretender's Dance at a conference held annually for members of the BIID community at Columbia University in June. They also plan on having a Boston premiere sometime in September at Coolidge Corner for the Tufts community and all those who participated in the film. Future plans for Vesto Productions include the development of Pretender's Dance into a full-length feature to be shot next summer. Other projects on the horizon include the production of a documentary about the life of Jonathan Neuman, the Tufts student with rock 'n' roll dreams who died of leukemia last summer at age 22. Vesto has obtained the rights to footage of Johnny Physical, as he was known, from renowned filmmaker Albert Mayles, director of the highly acclaimed Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter. This is a significant step for Vesto in establishing itself as a viable production company within Boston.

Eventually, Vesto Productions hopes to produce a variety of film projects ranging from feature films and music videos to commissioned works.