South Florida native Shawn Snyder has made it from Hollywood, Florida to Hollywood, California. He’s a filmmaker, and the writer/director of the new movie “To Dust.”
"To Dust is about a Hasidic cantor who's wife passes away and he struggles and fails to find religious, sort of spiritual emotional solace, but his grief is manifesting itself as this need to understand what's happening to her body physically as she's decomposing. Then to embark on what amounts to an increasingly literal undertaking into death, the morbid and the underworld," said Snyder.
Not only does the movie star Matthew Broderick, but it has some high-profile producers. And Shawn still can’t believe his good fortune regarding how the movie got made.
"The actress Emily Mortimer and her husband Alessandro Nivola and Ron Perlman had production companies and they both found their way to the script. Emily was in a jury at Tribeca and she read the script and I woke up to an email from Emily Mortimer saying that they would love to produce the movie. Then you daydream on who might be in this film and Matthew Broderick became a passionate champion, he was just a hero and day after day he came back. It was a shared passion for the project," said Snyder.
Long before he was a movie maker, Shawn was a singer/songwriter and he spent a lot of time making music in South Florida.
"I spend most of my 20's as a singer, songwriter using South Florida as a home base, plenty of strip-mall coffee shops. There was very tight community of artists fighting to be heard, " said Snyder.
Shawn’s journey has led him from behind the mic to the big screen and his film “To Dust” hits South Florida theaters March 15th and Shawn is incredibly excited about his homecoming.
"It's incredibly amazing to have this sort of homecoming, this film is going to be playing in theaters that I went to when I was growing up and that informed my level of film is just particularly exciting and to get to share it with family and friends and this community," said Snyder.
