A 97-minute feature film that a West Toledoan wrote, directed, produced, edited, financed, and starred in is being shown Monday at the world-famous TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, originally known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, near the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A Story Worth Living, a film by Vanessa Leonard, was accepted into the annual Golden Gate Film Festival that began Thursday and continues through March 2. All showings are at the TCL Chinese Theatre, including hers at 4 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday. For a complete schedule, visit goldenstatefilmfestival.com/schedule.
“It's so surreal,” Ms. Leonard said, adding that she was 13 years old on her first visit to Los Angeles and told her parents upon visiting the Hollywood Walk of Fame that she wanted to become a movie director when she grew up.
Now 31, Ms. Leonard began making films around her family’s house at age 12 and got involved with the Toledo-area film community in 2012.
About the only thing she outsourced for A Story Worth Living was color and sound, she said.
The independent film she created and is now marketing takes on the deep and sensitive topic of mental illness.
It’s a fictional story of a college student named Allison Foster who has been battling depression and anxiety since she was a young child, and how she copes with falling in love while trying to wean herself off medication because of an insurance dispute.
Ms. Leonard said she identifies with her movie character, but the similarities don’t go much beyond a mutual love of owls.
Her goal is to blow away the stigma of mental illness through her movie, and show Allison as a real person devoid of stereotypes people often associate with those afflicted by such conditions.
“Oftentimes when films portray mental illness, it is usually in the horror genre using schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive, and psychopathic disorders, Ms. Leonard wrote in the director’s statement on the movie flyer. “But I wanted to shed new light on mental illness: I wanted this film to be as raw and authentic as possible when speaking on the topics of depression and mood disorder.”
Ms. Leonard said she has a special affection for the film because of some people she knows who have been affected by mental illness. She said the National Association of Mental Illness, or NAMI, and the Toledo-based Zepf Center support her efforts to help combat the stigma, and a portion of the sale proceeds will go to Zepf.
“I wanted to create something people could relate to,” she said during a recent interview at Toledo’s Renaissance Hotel. “I think mental illness in general is slowly starting to be understood, but I don't think we're there yet.”
When she’s not working on films, Ms. Leonard is working as a development specialist for ProMedica Foundations.
She was a salutatorian at State Line Christian School in Temperance, from which she graduated in 2007 with a 4.0 grade-point average. She attended Owens Community College for two years after that, and got a communications degree from Bowling Green State University in 2012.
The Golden Gate Film Festival is the world premiere for her film, which she expects to enter in about 30 film festivals in 2020 and a dozen more in 2021.
Ms. Leonard said she has appeared in several independent films made in the Toledo area, but that A Story Worth Living is her first full-length feature film. She hopes to have local showings later this year, and get it picked up for home viewing via a major streaming service.
Ms. Leonard said she wrote the script in early 2017 to make good on a New Year’s resolution, and spent most of 2018 in production. Most of the scenes were shot in Toledo, but a few were done in Columbus and West Virginia, she said.
“I’ve always had a passion for film,” she said. “I’ve always had a passion for storytelling.”
Ms. Leonard’s husband, Brady Leonard, is a guitarist and lead singer in a Christian rock band, Southbound Fearing. Her brother, Jason Ferris, is drummer of a different Christian rock band, Bread of Stone.
Her father, Jeff Ferris, is a co-author of two inspirational memoirs, Unseen Arms and Unseen Arms Reaching Out.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre also was known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre for 28 years, from 1973 to 2001.
First Published February 22, 2020, 12:00 p.m.
