Director Biography - Jessie Lee Mills

Jessie Lee Mills is John Wells Fellow and an award-winning director. She directs, adapts, and consults on film, theater, and opera in venues throughout the United States and internationally. She received her MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University and is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Pomona College, where she is department chair.

Director Statement

This is a Story about Love is a deeply personal story that lives at the intersection of motherhood, disability, and race. While this is a true reflection of Meagan’s experience (our co-writer), we took care to narrativize it so that all could see themselves and feel invited into this piece. Early in shot-listing, we intentionally crafted angles and camera moves where we could both feel acutely inside of Meagan’s point of view as well as framing options where it felt like the audience was glimpsing – through doorframe, just a room away – into a deeply private and personal world.

And so our story began. We knew we wanted the story built around a fall at a park and that we wanted the camera to fall WITH Meagan. We wanted the audience to move with her in that critical moment. We also knew that we wanted the core of the film not to be about the fear, or the daily challenge of chronic illness, but about the love between a mother and her children. And so the title — which is another character, in a way — was born.

We knew we wanted to resist ableist tropes. We didn’t want disability to be told through metaphor, or to soften or heighten the truth of the experience. We didn’t want to shy away from how to feels to live, and parent, with a chronic illness. We wanted to show that it exists within a wide, kaleidoscopic tapestry, filled with so much more than disability. We opted for frames and shots that could help us build toward an impressionistic mosaic in post.

We also crafted this story in a way where we resisted traditional climactic structure. We invited and employed a feminist lens and placed the fall in the middle of the story, with waves rippling toward and away from it.

We also knew that the heart of this short — the through line — was the sacred ritual of a bedtime story. We wanted to show it in all of its forms — tender, loving, silly, sometimes chaotic, and, most of all, theirs.

In the end, this story is a love letter. It is a love letter to all mothers with disabilities, visible and invisible, who are aware of how choices throughout the day affect how much energy they may have by bedtime. It is a love letter to anyone who may not know how much energy, focus, bodily ease, pain, or clarity of thought they may have on any given day. It is a love letter to all parents who hold their children close. It is a love letter to everyone who works hard to create a sacred, loving ritual in their home against the backdrop of the harsh realities of the world. It is a love letter to anyone who knows how it feels to love deeply, with all that we have, and to embrace showing up in that love exactly as we are.

We invite you into a story that is deeply intentional, deeply personal, and above all, full of love.