Pre Trailer (2011)

Trailer for the comedy Pre, which screens at the Columbia Gorge International Film Festival.

Pre, a feature length film, was inspired by the days immediately after 9/ll and literally refers to the ninety minutes before a play starts. PRE is an ensemble story that follows a diverse group of young artists; packing backstage horseplay, romance, addiction, the-show-must-go-on tradition, even dream sequences and flashbacks into its 85 minutes. Inspired by New York City mythologies both pre and post 9/11 (notably a passage from E.B. White’s Here Is New York), Pre documents the every-day-ordinary backstage traumas that are heightened by an extraordinary situation to explore fundamental truths about our humanity. In New York City, right after 9/11, mainstream entertainment had not yet resumed, so it took nerve for Another Urban Riff to perform Mono three days after the attack but it was inspirational to be funny. The writer/director of Pre, who survived a crippling, near fatal collision following 9/11, injects the film with the same life-saving humor that helped him survive his own aftermath.

Pre recreates the small pocket of time directly following 9/11 when all New Yorkers, and most of the world, acted as if they were part of an ensemble.