Producing Pandemic Bread was a true community effort. Professor Zeinabu Irene Davis recruited undergraduate and graduate students from several universities to work as crew, promising limitless food and their first IMDB credits.
Seasoned actors Princess Punzalan, Becca Godinez and Claire Simba worked for the most modest wages that SAG would allow. Rizzhel Javier let us film a few scenes in her home. Christina Ree and Professor Wayne Yang did the same and enlisted their adolescent surfer son to perform in a minor role. I kneaded multiple loaves of bread for the shoot, delighted to earn credits as both Writer and Baker.
This project was enriched by many of our lived experiences. Apart from writing, I work as a Tagalog telephonic interpreter. At the height of the Covid 19 pandemic I was interpreting for end of life calls at least once a month. I quickly turned to baking to relieve the stress from those fraught phone calls. The original story on which Pandemic Bread is based was inspired by one such call that came in while I happened to be kneading a loaf of bread.
Princess Punzalan, who plays the interpreter in our film works as a hospice nurse in between acting gigs.
Becca Godinez nearly succumbed to the disease herself a year before Zeinabu cast her as the Covid pneumonia patient.
The film offered an all too rare opportunity for students and professional filmmakers of color to collaborate on a story by and about our underrepresented communities.
If you’d like to watch a behind-the scenes documentary about how this film was born, click on the link below:
https://pandemicbreadfilm.com/
To learn more about the folks who came together to make this film happen, click on this link: https://pandemicbreadfilm.com/about
Pandemic Bread is a universe away from Hollywood’s Marvel superhero movies with their CGI-enhanced scenes and cacophony of explosions, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Our indie film was born out of the heroic efforts of creative folk spinning cinematic gold out of virtual pennies. And if we could lay claim to a superpower it would be this: with Pandemic Bread we told the truth about the profound harm Covid inflicted upon us, from doctors to patients and everyone in between.
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