Wake Me Up When You’re Ready is an experimental comedy about Jay, a nonbinary sad sack whose spirit has been crushed by a year’s worth of horrifying headlines.
They don’t know how to be normal in a world consumed by climate disaster, police brutality, LGBTQ+ hate, worker exploitation…the list of injustices feels endless, so Jay spends most of their time holed up in their room, paralyzed by grief and fear.
Thankfully, their best friend, Elle, refuses to let Jay spend their birthday rotting in bed, so she throws them a 25th birthday party against their will. The story unfolds as a psychedelic portrait of Jay’s chosen family, and Jay spends the night straddling the fence between a breakthrough and a breakdown.
This film explores the role of the party along two axes:
The party as a means of soul retrieval (a gorgeous term borrowed from Fatimah Asghar)
The party as a tool for building revolutionary networks and community.
I was inspired to make Wake Me Up When You’re Ready because like Jay, I have been inundated with reports of genocide, famine, corruption, exploitation, murder, incarceration, reproductive coercion, and natural disaster, and as an independent artist, I want to make work that fights back against a Culture of Despair by offering an alternative vision of the world in which we live.
This film is for everybody in the LGBTQ+ community and beyond who are afraid of what the future holds, and I want to fill audiences with a sense of love and courage by telling a queer story that raises femme queens and t-boys up as main characters reverberating with unrestrained humor, irresistible beauty, and extraordinary power.
Additionally, I was motivated to make this film because I am connected with so many talented, hard working filmmakers, artists, actors, grips, gaffers, DPs, writers, and musicians who have been out of work for months, and I wanted to create an environment for them to do what they are best at without any capitalistic demands on their time and energy.
All of the department heads and acting leads of this film were Queer and Trans POC, and this project is a showcase of the brilliant people in my creative community who have immense skill as worldbuilders.