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| Elephant Palm Tree on the Sundance Online Film Festival By Claiborne Smith London-based filmmaker Kara Miller’s Elephant Palm Tree is a 10-minute short about a former Miss Jamaica who dreams one night that she and her husband are in Africa, on their honeymoon amid the palm trees, when all of a sudden a big old elephant approaches and poops on them. Naturally, after she wakes up, she wants a divorce. Where, how and when the plot of Elephant Palm Tree came to fruition are questions that deserve revealing answers. “The cool part of me wants to say ‘I don’t know,’” Miller said. But because she grew up in the Caribbean, which, she pointed out, is highly stratified by class, “my subconscious must have been looking at a certain kind of marriage in the middle classes” – almost, but not quite, an arranged marriage. “What happens when the most popular girl in the school marries the most popular guy? What happens 30 years later?” she wondered. Miller thought about it and later explained in an e-mail exchange that she probably dreamed Martha having her elephant dream, as well as dreaming Martha’s emotional awakening after her African horror. “They came fully formed,” she explained. “I wrote the script in an hour! From start to finish.” If Hubert and Martha, the hapless couple in Elephant Palm Tree, once were the most popular kids in school, the intervening years have been a decidedly downhill slide. Martha is an alcoholic; George is a calculating, imperious politician. |