Two former Fox Valley residents have created a short film that will be screened May 4 at the Beverly Hills Film Festival.
Nathan L. Slager, originally of St. Charles; and his wife Shelby Slager, originally of Elgin, co-wrote and co-produced their debut short film, “Chasing June,” in which Shelby Slager also stars and directs.
The Slagers, who now reside in Los Angeles, are both graduates of North Central College in Naperville. The film was shot at locations in Elgin and Burlington, including at her childhood home and at Burlington Central High School.
“Chasing June” will be screened at 1 p.m. May 4 at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
“Chasing June” is a short film about three friends, Oliver, June and Michael, who are inseparable until an accident on the night of graduation sets them on separate paths. After three years, Oliver returns home hoping to avoid the past, but June won’t let him, Nathan Slager said. Meanwhile, with the weight of the past and June’s current cancer diagnosis, Oliver is thrown into an emotional spiral.
“We use magical realism and contemporary dance to explore the complexities of grief and the resentment he feels and we’re asking the question, ‘can you ever really move on from tragedy?’,” Nathan Slager said.
This is a heavy, emotional piece that’s inspired by their own experiences, he said.
“I lost my brother when I was six and watched him pass away and I saw how that affected my family, how it fractured my family. And I repressed a lot of grief for years,” he said. “The Oliver character is inspired by that traumatic event and trying to repress those emotions.”
The character of June is inspired by the cancer journey of someone in Shelby Slager’s family.
They filmed it over five days in November 2022, funded through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Most of the cast and crew donated their time to the project.
Nathan Slager studied English Literature while Shelby Slager studied theater at North Central. They moved to Chicago after graduation, where Shelby Slager worked in theater and film. She ended up getting more film work and fell in love with it, she said. She urged her husband to write a role for her and he eventually did.
“I initially started writing it on my own, but pretty quickly Shelby became such an integral part of the process with notes and editing that we’re like, well, we’re just writing this together,” he said. “It’s been such an awesome partnership, writing-wise. She’s incredible at it.”
A screenplay is very stylized, even compared to a theater script, so even formatting it was a learning process. They wrote the first draft on Microsoft Word, not knowing there are screenwriting software programs available.
“You can’t really describe things, it is supposed to be exactly visual about what you see,” she said. “It’s a really different writing process.”
“Everything has to be action or dialogue,” he agreed.
When the film was finished, they uploaded the film to the FilmFreeway website and submitted it to the Beverly Hills Film Festival.
“It jumped out to us because of the location it would be premiering and the proximity to the film industry itself,” he said. “We were lucky enough to be accepted as an official selection. We’re having the world premier at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. We’re extremely excited.”
The other actors are Sargon Odicho as Oliver and Craig Ymson as Michael. Odicho is from the northern suburbs, she said, and Ymson is from Elgin and also went to Central High School.
They will continue to submit “Chasing June” to film festivals with the ultimate goal of making it into a full-length feature, she said.
Annie Alleman is a freelance reporter for the Courier-News.
