The Story: Miranda abhors celebrating her birthday but her clueless husband insists on throwing her a surprise party, leaving their two adult children to try and derail his plans before the family's schisms come to a combustive head.
Writer & Director: Eric Mann Producer: Meera Joshi Production Company: Darling Street Pictures
Starring: Stacey King, Grant Beban, Georgia Adams, Adam Herbert, Sudeepta Vyas, Shama Shaheen, Susan Holt, Branka Vikich, Nara Toktoshova, & Joanne Poole
This film is part of the "Storm in a Teacup" world and is the sister film to Meera Joshi's short film "A Suit We Wear" which includes the same characters and many of the same scenes but from different perspectives.
Director's Statement:
“The greatest gift you can give me is to leave me alone.” This line from Miranda, the mother of the family in the film, encapsulates why I made "Flowers on Her Birthday". The two themes of one’s inability to see beyond their own perspective and the isolation of self-imposed sadness collide as she pleads with her family to not to continue her surprise birthday party. Drawing on my own life, the Flowers on Her Birthday screenplay is a culmination of my intimate observations of myself, family and friends as our preoccupation with our own happiness, self-delusions, and quest for purpose can blur our perspective on how we should treat others.
The challenge story-wise for myself was to balance how each member of the family of four is wrapped up in their own thoughts and how that guides their misinterpretation of one another. The mother wants to be unnoticed. The father craves to be admired. The son is unrealistic about who he is. The daughter is burdened by keeping the peace. The complexity was overwhelming. But the isolation of the global pandemic unexpectedly led me to watch all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays, and his soliloquies were a stylistic breath of fresh air. A stylistic synthesis of theater and film inspired me to open up the characters’ thoughts directly to the audience by breaking the fourth wall and externalizing their fantasies to illuminate how far apart from one another they had drifted.
However, even with the drama of a family bursting at the seams, I have what I hope is a healthy appreciation for the absurdity of life and hence try to find the humor in most interactions. It’s all a storm in a teacup. And for this family, a lack of self awareness was very funny to me. Thankfully our troupe of Wellington and Auckland based actors could dance beautifully on that fine line between sadness and absurdity, a line that New Zealanders seem predisposed to exploit. The cast, my producing partner Meera, and I rewrote much of the original script together, not only to fine tune the family’s disconnection, but also to infuse the spirit of New Zealand culture, social norms, and humor into the film.
Furthermore, most of the design of Flowers is heavily inspired by New Zealand, especially the nation’s distinctive native birds. From our beer brand “Pukeko Porter”, to the bird portraits around the house designed by the talented artist Hansol Kim, to the ever present bird-themed family clock, the family’s obsession with native birds became the through line of what pulls the family together. Beyond birds, the cheary, innocent beauty of Wellington offers a foil to the somber inner workings of the characters, most exemplified when Miranda tells her two acquaintances at a cafe that maybe she and her husband have “drifted too far apart.”
In fact Flowers on Her Birthday began because my partner and fellow filmmaker, Meera Joshi, was born in New Zealand but raised in Australia and wanted to reconnect with the country. Being filmmakers, we thought of no better way to get to know a place than to make films there. We began writing but soon our stories organically collided and the two films became intertwined, with my film Flowers on Her Birthday and Meera’s film A Suit We Wear, about a young Indian woman coming out to her mother, having scenes and characters that overlap with one another in the same world. We filmed concurrently, often trading off directorial duties in the same scene, and now the two films can be watched side by side in all their intertwining glory. Going forward, we are working on intercutting the two films together into a pilot for a series we call Storm in a Teacup for New Zealand Television. The series will follow the two very different families as they continue to work through interpersonal challenges while trying to find fulfillment in the eclectic city of Wellington.
One final note, the music for the film is steeped in Brazilian jazz and was lead by our composer Ayrton "Sennóide" Farias, who is based is Recife, Brazil. He pulled together a band of exceptionally talented local musicians, including himself playing bass, for several days of improvisational sessions to find the right tone for the film. They were so prolific, they ended up recording almost an hour worth of music that Ayrton mixed into a full album “Flowers on Her Birthday (Original Motion Picture Score)”. You can find it now worldwide on streaming platforms such as Tidal, Spotify, and YouTube.
Thank you so much for watching Flowers on Her Birthday and hopefully A Suit We Wear as well. The projects were a labor of love and myself, Meera, the cast, and crew are all so happy it’s getting out into the world.
Enjoy!
Eric Mann
Eric Mann
Stills from the Film
Behind the scenes
Making the score with composer ayrton Farias in Recife, Brazil
"Flowers on Her Birthday" Poster Illustrated by Hansol Kim
