A contemporary dramedy about a group of Bay Area friends in their early 40s navigating one of those life moments together: expecting a surrogate baby, a long and deep friendship in jeopardy, two women finally deciding to marry after years of living together, a novelist with crippling writer's block. Capturing this next uncharted chapter of their extended family, Beautiful Dreamer explores the messy secrets and complicated nature of parenthood and the modern family, all the while testing the boundaries of love and friendship and the bioethics of surrogacy. 

Produced (Lynn Webb) & directed (Amy Glazer) by the team that brought SEDUCING CHARLIE BARKER to FLIFF in 2010, and won Best American Indie. BEAUTIFUL DREAMER is a combination of drama, comedy and the bittersweetness of life.

Director: Amy Glazer is an award-winning director of theater and film who is known for telling moving and authentic human stories for both stage and screen. Coming from a family with deep roots in the entertainment world, Glazer has directed acclaimed plays in the United States and abroad and has turned a number of plays into well-received films. Glazer hails from Miami Beach, where she grew up with her brother Mitch, who is a screenwriter and director. Her uncle, Sidney Glazier, was an Academy Award winning film producer, and another uncle, Tom Glazer, was a renowned folk singer and songwriter. She began in the industry by directing dozens of plays at prominent Bay Area theaters and was the Associate Artistic Director of the SF Playhouse and an Associate Artist at Magic Theatre. She is also a professor of theater and film at San Jose State University.

Expanding her portfolio, she began adapting plays into films. The Surrogate, her fourth such adaptation, is an homage to the Bay Area, her home for the past 30 years. Her most recently completed film, Kepler's Dream, received the Silver Award for Family Favorite: at the Mill Valley International Film Festival. Adapted from a Y/A novel, the story is about a young girl forced to live with her estranged grandmother, which stars Holland Taylor and Kelly Lynch and which Hollywood Reporter called a "diverting family film charmer." Kepler’s Dream can be found on Amazon Prime, Showtime Google Play and YouTube.

Of her 2010 film, Seducing Charlie Barker, (Theresa Rebeck), which premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Everything about this movie feels right.” and went on to win numerous awards. These include the Grand Prize Award at the Canada International Film Festival, Best American Indie Award at the Ft. Lauderdale International Film Festival, and Best Filmmaker Award at the Jersey Shore Film Festival. Other films include Drifting Elegant (Steven Belber) and a short, Ball Lightning (Barry Gifford) which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival.

Sponsored By: Naomi Jennings in honor of Todd and William Bercik.

Director Statement:

Beautiful Dreamer is my fourth film adaptation based on a play. In many ways, because I’ve been a theater director for decades, I start with the play, with the characters and then begin to imagine this character-driven narrative unfolding visually.

After working in partnership with producer Lynn Webb on Seducing Charlie Barker (Teresa Rebeck’s script I adapted from her play THE SCENE) Lynn asked me to once again come on board. We wanted to find a female, character-driven story that would also be a love letter to our Bay Area home. When we found the play THE SURROGATE by Patricia Cotter, we felt we had discovered a contemporary story about Bay Area characters we both knew and wanted to reveal. At its core, the film is about a writer and her best friend who’s going through the many stages of infertility with his wife. Their struggle and myopia around this pervasive hunger to have a biological family triggers mistrust and a sense of abandonment between them.

As someone who has personally struggled with infertility, I understand the obsessive nature and desperation that comes with wanting to give birth so badly. I also wrestle with the bioethics of infertility and with the commodification of another woman’s body. This story doesn’t have the answers, but it does explore, and hopefully demystifies, the hard and real choices we each make to build our families.

The characters in Beautiful Dreamer are imperfect, flawed and human. At their core is a deep love for each other, a commitment to “growing up” and growing old together — to, as Bonnie Bishop sings in her poignant end credit song, “keep on moving”. The joy is in the journey.