Screen shot from the movie, “Counting For Thunder”
Lake Highlands is home-base for many a great filmmaker and producer. We claim John Magary, Cameron Nelson and Katie Norris (whose story will be in the December Lake Highlands Advocate). So it’s not a huge surprise that another of our own, Ellen Raff, who also used to write a column for the Lake Highlands Advocate, is the associate producer, in partnership with director/screenwriter/actor Phillip Irwin Cooper, on a new — already award-winning — feature film called “Counting For Thunder.”
The movie offers an autobiographical tale about Cooper, who, unlucky in work, money and love goes home to the Alabaman gulf coast. When his relationship with Caroline, a UCLA college professor, hits the skids at the same time his mother receives a dire medical diagnosis, he works through his past with his complicated family, some old high school chums, and the desperate and hilarious southern characters who grace his hometown. In this journey, “Phillip learns more about his mother than he ever bargained for, and more about himself than he ever guessed possible. He ultimately finds his own voice as his mother is regaining hers,” say the producers.
Producer Marsha Oglesby, who grew up in the South, compares the heart of “Counting for Thunder” to “Terms of Endearment,” as played between a mother and son.
The movie stars Mariette Hartley, as the mother. At Rhode Island International Film Festival in July, it won Grand Prize and Alternative Spirit Award. At Columbia River Gorge International Film Festival in August, the film won the Audience Favorite Award.
See it Friday afternoon at the Lone Star Film Festival, at 2:45 p.m. at the AMC Palace Theater 2 (220 E. Third Street, Fort Worth, TX, 76102).
Keep up with future screenings via the Facebook page.
