Jim Akin came Center Stage with Mark Gordon to talk his new film THE OCEAN OF HELENA LEE which follows twelve-year-old Helena Lee’s lyrical pilgrimage from summer to spring with her bohemian surf-rat father in the carnival of California’s Venice beach.
Helena Lee sleeps in the sandy closet of a one-room apartment in an unkempt corner of California’s Venice Beach. Her father, charismatic surf-rat Mickey, spurs her journey as an aspiring writer with his iconoclastic absurdist view of the world.
Helena conducts a season to season pilgrimage in and around the carnival of beach life; observing the bohemian locals, the hopeful tourists, the lost and forgotten who have reached the end of the map. Helena’s observations lead to an introspective spiritual and intellectual wanderlust often leaving her standing at the water’s edge, facing the void, a head and heart full of unanswerable questions—How shall I to live? why did my mother die?
At the cusp of adolescence, her view of what it means to become a woman is torn between the opposing influences of the free spirited strippers who flock around Mickey and the sacred memory of her mother Luisa (singer/songwriter, Maria McKee). Forever preserved in Helena’s wakeful dream, the vision of her mother is a saintly protector who haunts with calming advice and compassionate lullabies. As winter approaches and the sea and sky begin to darken, Helena’s quest to find her identity is hastened and forever impacted by a life-altering event.
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