'Empty Room': Rowan crew wins CINE Golden Eagle Award for personal story on impact of drug addiction on a family
February 05, 2010
REUNITED: In a still from "Empty Room," Nicole Fogel is reunited with her mother, Elaine Johnston.
"I was crushed between the seat and the car door," Clements says. "I just remember thinking, ‘I hope this turns out. I hope this turns out.'"
Turns out? The scene is one of the most honest and heart-wrenching moments in "Empty Room," an award-winning documentary by Rowan University students Acquesta, Clements and Patrick McKee.
In the scene, Acquesta, then a 22-year-old Rowan senior, finally finds her cousin, Nicole Fogel, also 22, in the parking lot of a Walgreen's in Philadelphia's Kensington section.
Battling drug addiction, Fogel had been completely out of touch with her family, including her mother and cousin, for more than two years. Taking long drags of a cigarette, tears roll down Fogel's face as she sits in Acquesta's car and views a video message to her from her mother, Elaine Johnston.
"I think," Johnston tells her, "you've had enough hell in your life to last a couple (of) people's lifetimes."
Created for Professor Diana Nicolae's Documentary Production course last spring, "Empty Room" documents Acquesta's desperate search for her cousin. The film ends with Fogel embracing her mother as Acquesta closes the front door, another of the emotional film's most telling images.
"Empty Room" recently became the 10th Rowan film to win a prestigious CINE Golden Eagle Award in the competition's student documentary division. For over five decades, CINE Golden Eagle Awards have been recognized as a mark of excellence in the film and television industry. Past winners of the award include Steven Spielberg, Ken Burns and Ron Howard, putting Acquesta (producer), Clements (editor) and McKee (director) in some pretty exclusive company.
The film was screened at the DownBeach Film Festival in Atlantic City last fall.
For Acquesta, the intensely personal story was one that she felt compelled to tell. She was fortunate, she says, that her aunt was open to the documentary, something that Acquesta acknowledges was an act of true bravery.
"My aunt is probably the strongest person I know. She was very forthcoming. When we started the film, I thought, ‘I have to show my family for what it is,'" says Acquesta, a Turnersville resident who graduated from Rowan with her Radio/Television/Film (RTF) in 2009. She now works as a freelance production assistant for Showtime Networks.
Clements, of Glassboro, also a 2009 RTF graduate, was the project's editor, but picked up camera duties when Fogel called Acquesta, out of the blue, to set up an 11th hour meeting. The film was nearly complete, but the crew scrambled, in a single day, to meet up with Fogel and reunite her with her mother, a scene Clements also filmed. McKee, of Westmont, the director and lead camera on the project, was out of the state for the day.
"When Nicole called, we were already two or three weeks into post-production," says Clements, who now works for MyPHL17 in Philadelphia. "We already had something in place without Nicole being found.
"Tara was very passionate about this film and I was very keen on doing it," continues Clements, who edited down 19 hours of raw footage and two hours of audio into the 29-minute, 46-second film. Clements and Acquesta also composed original music for the film.
"To me, it's an excellent story about not giving up hope. People told Tara that she might not want to find Nicole. Nicole kind of found Tara instead."
Clearly, as evidenced in the film, Fogel wanted to be found, wanted to leave a life of drug addiction, wanted to reconcile with her mother and her family. After the reconciliation, Fogel attended drug rehab. Today, she lives with her mother in Philadelphia. Last spring, she attended the premiere of "Empty Room" at Rowan.
For McKee, the mother-daughter relationship in the film is telling, as is its message of the impact drug addiction has on whole families, not just parents and children.
"There was a whole lapse of communication between them, a whole big ball of untapped love that they weren't communicating about," says McKee, a junior double major in computer science and RTF at Rowan.
"When people think about addicts, they think, ‘Oh, they're selfish.' We tried to show Nicole was not a bad person. When you watch the film, you really feel for Nicole," he adds.
One of the compelling scenes for McKee is when Johnston tapes a message to her daughter. The film crew decided to set up the camera and leave the room.
"No one was behind the camera. That's as close as you can possibly get to a private message," says McKee. "We wanted real talk. Elaine was told, ‘Talk to her. Don't talk to us.'"
"The film was intended to be a ‘flare in the sky' for Nicole if I ever found her," says Acquesta. "Ultimately, I'd like audiences to take away the feeling of actual hope and to appreciate the close bonds in their lives, even when situations seem insurmountable.
"Sometimes, ‘hope' is idealized. I wanted to show a family's really hard and emotional search, whether I was successful or not. I wanted to communicate the reality of hope."
Acquesta credits Nicolae, her professor and the documentary's executive producer, for her guidance on the film.
"There are not many women in the film field or in the classrooms," says Acquesta. "She always believed in me. She had confidence in me. She helped to mold me so that I was ready to do this documentary, to tell this story."
Notes:To view "Empty Room," visit http://vimeo.com/5005248.
