SYNOPSIS

On the Olympic fencing stage, Keeth Smart is one point away from winning a medal for the US team when he steps out of bounds. The referee calls for a video replay as Keeth looks to the sky and prays to God, Mom, and Dad, “I’ve been through so much. You gotta help me through this.”

Through home videos and animated sketches, we follow Keeth as a discarded kid rising to become the first American to rank 1st in the world in fencing. Then multiple personal tragedies overcome him just months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As the spirits of his parents answer the call and guide his hand to victory, we feel the limitless love between parent and child.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Raised in Lawrence, Kansas by two schoolteachers, Luther Clement’s first passion was fencing. At age 14 he began representing the USA as a sabre fencer. After a bronze medal at the Under 17 World Championships and a gold medal at an Under 20 World Cup, Luther moved to NYC to train with the best sabre fencers in the country, among them Keeth Smart. Though he later became an NCAA All-American and North American Cup Champion, a tragic accident that broke multiple bones impeded his hopes of joining the US Olympic Team.

After the accident, Luther found two inspirations: volunteering at the Peter Westbrook Foundation and taking a filmmaking elective in college which allowed him to experiment with a 16mm Bolex camera. The combination of these things proved fortuitous: the fencing community and the mentorship from Peter Westbrook helped him heal and it was through filmmaking that he found his true passion.

Shuhan Fan’s love for filmmaking and storytelling began as early as she can remember, having been born into a family of media makers in China. She grew up accompanying her parents and relatives to countless edit bays and film sets. After graduating from Communication University of China with a degree in TV Editing and Directing, she decided to continue her education by getting an MFA in the States.

When co-directors Luther Clement and Shuhan Fan met at Northwestern University in Chicago while pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media, Luther had already been developing a project about his friend and former fencing teammate, Keeth Smart. After seeing Shuhan’s thesis film, One Eightieth of Zhang Tianyi, the two directors joined forces, merging Luther’s dynamic, associative visual style with Shuhan’s surrealist film logic and talent for story structure. They quickly secured Nevo Shinaar, a classmate at Northwestern in the same MFA program, to produce the film within a filmmaking collective called Site, that Luther and Nevo began with a handful of classmates to support diverse voices in nonfiction film.

Soon after Shuhan, Luther and Nevo began collaborating, they submitted a proposal to the Tribeca Film Institute which generously came on board with grant money. Having secured some money and having secured the trust of Keeth and his sister Erinn Smart, the trio began the long process of crafting the story from archival footage given to them by the Smart siblings.

Not long into the process they realized that to get the narrative to hit the right notes they needed to license Olympic footage. Since the money they had raised wasn’t going to be enough to even license one Olympic clip, they had to get creative.

That’s when they enlisted the help of Aaron Brewer, an animator on such productions as Amazon’s Nico and the Sword of Light, to bring Keeth’s memories alive through animation. Luther and Shuhan were already huge fans of his work, and knew that his background in martial arts contributed to Aaron’s feel for animating physicality. Aaron and Luther worked closely to create animation that wasn’t ‘too slick,’ so that it felt as though Keeth’s hand might actually have drawn it.

The end result is a film that came together out of the love for Keeth and Erin, to be true to their story and share it with the world.