13 Moments After

TYPE: Narrative Feature
GENRE: Drama
STATUS: Development

LOGLINE

A high school sophomore grapples with a violent, sudden theft of innocence. He traverses the harsh realities while losing his sense of self.

SYNOPSIS

A lower-middle class house rests centered in front us on a chilly, suburban, winter night. The dim street-lights shine an unfriendly glow as a car stealthily pulls up. It parks for a moment before the passenger door opens and our survivor, NEIL (15), steps out. The unseen driver closes the door and drives off while Neil seats himself on the porch steps. He loses control of his body and starts shivering uncontrollably, lost in thought, existing outside his body and soul. Something awful has happened that he can’t begin to comprehend. But he must regain his composure. He settles himself and enters the house where his parents are cozied up watching television. Neil is not interested in that at all and heads straight upstairs where he crashes in bed, winter puffer jacket still on. He ignores his concerned mother who questions him from the corridor about his tennis practice, but gives up when Neil is steadfast in his silence. The fog of sleep overwhelms up until he—-

Snaps awake in a sweaty panic, still wearing his clothes from the night before. Neil immediately hops in the shower where the water runs scalding hot, causing Neil to scream out in pain. Downstairs, a bowl of oats prepared by his mother awaits him, but as Neil tries to eat his breakfast, his body immediately rejects the food and he starts to dry heave, entering a panic attack. His breath quickens as his body spasms, there’s something seriously wrong. When it passes, Neil reaches for his phone and searches: “what to do if you’ve been molested.” A series of articles, hotlines, and advice pops up, with the main key phrase searing into his mind being “reach out for support.” Neil switches over to a text thread with his best friend Ryan and asks what he’s up to. 

Later that day Ryan and Neil hang out and play video games while Ryan recounts hooking up with a girl the night before. Neil’s extremely on edge, trying to hide his discomfort with the sexual conversation. There’s no time or safety for him to tell Ryan anything, so he excuses himself, stealing a bottle of alcohol from Ryan’s brother’s bedroom on his way out. Neil spends the rest of the day alone enveloped in a suffering that overwhelms his being. He stares out over the edge of a bridge, haunted by echoes of sorrows and whispers of impending anguish. Time itself is a relentless adversary, each agonizing moment lost to the abyss. He’s haunted by images of a “balloon man” which stalks him in the playground. He’s craving to feel something, anything, just to ensure his own existence. 

That night, he drinks the stolen alcohol, needing to leave this world, to alter the state of his mind. To be somebody else. But Neil’s aware of the harm he’s causing himself and tries to right the uncontrollable spiral. He messages his tennis friend Nadia, who has the same Coach as Neil, and says he has something important to tell her. The two meet up at a diner, where Nadia is a bit late coming straight from practice. But Neil can’t muster up the energy or will to tell Nadia the truth, instead saying to her that  he doesn’t want to be her doubles partner anymore. Nadia is a bit hurt by it, but Neil finesses his way out of the conversation and eases up a bit as a waiter passes by the screen and when they exit we’re in the same place, months later, where Neil is hanging with Ryan and two other friends. They engage in a vulgar, sex-driven conversation and Neil seems to have his bearings about him. He’s conversational, witty, and a joy to be around, a side we have yet to see from him.

But the socializing does take a lot of him, and he immediately crashes in bed when he gets home to decompress. The screen goes black as he shuts his eyes and an older Neil narrates over a series of still-life images the story between him and Coach. How it happened. The loss of innocence. The break of trust. 

It’s a year later and Neil is working on some homework when he gets a surprise text from Nadia. She’s attached an article. Coach has been arrested for sexually abusing and molesting other boys. Neil’s reaction is muted, unreadable. He gets called by his parents for dinner, a humble KFC feast, and at the dinner table, Neil’s mother also gets a text from somebody who delivers her the news about Coach. She shares it with the table and then asks Neil if Coach ever did anything to him, to which Neil responds with an emphatic, “No.” And on that, we cut to black, reflecting upon Neil’s harrowing journey and experience as the credits roll.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

I was molested and sexually assaulted by my golf coach in eighth grade. 13 Moments After is a film confronting head on the emotional and physical fallout of that traumatic event. It’s an experiment in visualizing the most internally conflicting and confusing feelings in an honest way, designed to be executed with minimal narrative dramatization, yet still viscerally draw in a viewer. As a survivor, it feels insulting when films and TV shows sanitize the true effects of PTSD. Experiencing Rape Trauma Syndrome does not come with a neatly fitted story for a larger narrative purpose, it is an intensely personal, lonely, chaotic, and debilitating feeling that deserves to be depicted with direct, raw, and unmistakable clarity. The days, weeks, and years following my assault came with episodes of blackout alternating with episodes of intense remembering. It led to a dissociation of my body and soul, that I am just now, eleven years later, recovering from. It triggered visions, nightmares, and insomnia. I endured bouts of self harm, bulimia, body dysmorphia, and alcohol abuse. I spent hours on the internet seeking a connection, all while successfully pretending everything was okay to my real life friends and family. Nobody ever noticed anything wrong. The one time I was asked how I was doing was in the wake of my coach’s arrest, when my parents asked if he ever did anything to me, to which I responded with a resounding, “no.” To this day there are only a handful of people in my life who know about this, but finally, I feel ready to tell this story in the only way I know how, through film. Everything just mentioned is shown in 13 Moments After through an array of visual and aural techniques to place the audience in the shoes of a teenager suffering from such an event. There is a juxtaposition between the intimate and the alienated. At times, we see our protagonist from a far distance, while being able to hear their breaths and rustling of their clothes. We linger on the soft, oppressive scenes of suburbia, where it can feel like there is no world outside, because for our survivor, there is nothing else but a lost spirit floating within the flesh he inhabits, but cannot feel. I understand this is not an easy film, but it’s my life, and unbeknownst to me at the time, the core reason why I make films. To explore the difficult and the personal. To uncover the deeper truths that exist within all of us. This is a film made by a survivor, and I hope you will help support me in making this vision come to life. - Raza Rizvi

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