Having given up her career in music, Nora returns to her hometown to focus on her precocious six-year-old, a new house, a new school year, and the place she deliberately left behind. Her dreams and ambitions, however, have different plans.
First-time feature filmmaker Anna Campbell brings a joyful, unflinching look at modern motherhood clashing with the artistic notion of pursuing your passion. This uniquely structured film with a completely original soundtrack uses the emotional bombshell that music provides to create a music movie for the MTV generation.
Production Team
WRITTEN, DIRECTED, & PRODUCED BY
Anna Campbell
Anna Campbell was born in Portland, OR. After attending Vassar College, she moved back to the west coast to pursue her dreams of being an actor in Los Angeles, with her first speaking role being on Veronica Mars and her most recent on NCIS. It took a few years before realizing that producing and directing were an essential part of having a significant voice in the stories being made, at which point she fully embraced being a hyphenate. NORA is her first feature film.
The Cast
Director's Statement
In 2020 when the world blew up, we finally started an honest conversation about the pressures of modern motherhood. The physical and emotional burden that I felt, balancing parenting, working, and a sense of self, an always tentative situation suddenly became an impossible task, and I was relieved that the national news finally seemed to take notice.
I grew up believing that I could have it all for some odd reason. I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dream, have an amazing career, and two beautiful children, cook dinner every night and keep a flawless house, there was probably a damn picket fence in my head. Even listing my vision for my perfect life seems like a lesson in insanity. I had to pick, and my children came first, and without even realizing it, I came dead last.
Coming home is scary. In 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, we made the difficult choice to return to Portland, OR where I grew up. I was devastated at the possible loss of my dream, knowing I still desperately wanted to tell my own stories. Ironically, I had already written NORA, based on the fear of what was now real: did I have to choose between the picket fence and myself, that thing that mothers, in particular, are expected to put aside?
The pandemic may have inspired my return, but the fear of giving up on the dream that never died inspired me to turn my fraught homecoming into an opportunity. Using music as an emotional bombshell and tying it into my overactive imagination felt inevitable. I was lucky to have my family at my side, working on the film with me (my daughter plays my child in the film, my husband edited the film and provided the same tireless childcare that is expected of mothers day in and day out).
I hope that more women are met with the support I received when I finally asked that it was my turn to pour myself into something as all-consuming as making my first feature. I want to fight for a world where women are encouraged to create their own space and dare to dream with insane flights of fantasy. I hope this inspires mothers to include their children in their dreams, so we can inspire a new generation of over-imaginative thinkers who can change the world.
-Anna
The Music
Music is the ultimate communicator of pure emotion. Written by music industry and Rock N’ Roll veteran Noah Harmon (Airborne Toxic Event), this incredible soundtrack stands on its own and elevates the film.
Nora is a singer-songwriter with her roots in rock and her heart in maintaining the independence of her own sound. The songs deliberately show range from intimate to anthem. Just as the music videos remind us of the old world of MTV, the songs are written to feel like the music that got you through “that” time in your life, because they come from “that” time in Nora’s, from a place of honesty and vulnerability.
Anna Campbell sings the songs as they come to Nora, the emotional journey eventually forming her next album.
Reality ∞ Fantasy
The film alternates between stark reality and the fantasy of the music videos that exist when Nora lets herself write what she truly feels. Along the way, she fights her own nature to wish she could conform, as we visually follow the struggle.
Nora’s real-world story is a journey of vulnerability, intimacy, and the desire to understand one’s place in the world with all of its complex humanness.
In contrast, Nora’s internal journey, through the “Music Videos,” take us to the fantasy world inside. For each of these unique moments in the film, a drastic and deliberately new style is adopted: an epic romantic journey shot with drones, using blue screen to create a storybook, animation to bring a comic book to life, creating a 1950s world and smashing it by shooting with the Bolt and the Phantom, recreating an 80s music video, and turning our lead into a mannequin shooting in unusual frame rates.
