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Tomahawk Springs
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TYPE: Narrative Feature
GENRE: Comedy
STATUS: Development
LOGLINE
Mother and son hit the road west, stopping at diners, motels, and hot springs along the way.
SYNOPSIS
After 17-year-old Daniel is expelled from high school in Indiana, his Lebanese mother Layal decides it’s best he move out to his father Anton’s place in California. Agreeing to meet Anton halfway in New Mexico, mother and son journey the road west, and encounter themselves along the way.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
I travelled across the United States by car for the first time in 2012, age 22. Over the next decade, I’d visit the high desert out west a second and third time. All the while, Tomahawk Springs was on my mind. “A mother and son drive across the country and stop at hot springs along the way,” I kept saying — picturing a lyrical, comedic, touching film about travel, identity, place and home. Ultimately, this is a story about a single Lebanese woman raising her teenage son in diaspora — the generational and cultural differences between them, and the fundamental things that make them inseparably similar. In some allegorical way, it’s also a story about my moving west: finding home in a new place, and through that iterative process, finding home back home again.
KEY CREW
Ramzi Bashour - Writer/Director
Ramzi Bashour is a Syrian-American filmmaker based in New York. He grew up in Beirut, Lebanon and over the years has worked as a cook, baker, journalist, teacher, and videographer.
He studied creative writing and music at Indiana University and received his MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts as a Dean’s Fellow in 2020. His short film, The Trees, won the International Special Jury Prize at Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival in 2021. He was recently featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s "25 New Faces in Independent Film" and was a Sundance Institute Fellow in 2022, with his feature script, Tomahawk Springs.
His work explores the darkly comic and deeply moving. Ramzi is also a musician who composes for the screen and currently produces educational videos by day.
Jesse Hope - Producer
Jesse Hope is a filmmaker from Telluride, Colorado who runs Dead End Pictures. Jesse has worked an eclectic career around the film industry in the Southwest; as a Special Effects Technician on dozens of feature films including The Hateful Eight, a Greensperson on The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and a screener for the Telluride Film Festival. Jesse helped produce the feature film A Love Song, which was recently acquired in a global sale by Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions and Bleecker Street. Jesse lives in Southwest Colorado and hopes to make films there for a long time.
Max Walker-Silverman - Producer
Max Walker-Silverman is a director and producer from the mountains of Southwest Colorado. Work from his production company Cow Hip Films has been awarded the Special Jury Prize at SXSW 2021, several Vimeo Staff Picks, the Panavision New Filmmaker Prize, among others. His first feature, A Love Song, stars Dale Dickey, Academy Award Honoree Wes Studi, and was co-produced by Jesse Hope and Academy Award winner Dan Janvey. Max lives in the Mountain West and is committed to gentle stories from rural America.
Alfonso Herrera-Salcedo - Director of Photography
Alfonso Herrera-Salcedo is a Mexican cinematographer based in New York and Mexico City. He has lensed award-winning films that premiered at Venice Biennale, Cine de Morelia, SXSW, IFFR, and others. Alfonso won the 2018 Kodak Vision Award, the Arri Volker Banheman Award, Camerimage's 2019 Golden Tadpole, and the Bisato d'Oro for Best Cinematography at the 78th Venice Biennale 2021.
Nay Tabbara - Editor
Nay Tabbara is a Lebanese filmmaker based in New York who began her on-set experience working as an assistant director on numerous award winning pictures, most notably The Insult by Ziad Doueiri (2017 Academy Award nominee). She is currently completing her MFA at NYU Tisch School of the Arts where she also teaches the craft of Editing as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Film department.
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