DANNY MADDEN
Danny Madden grew up in the Southeast, making movies with friends and family under the moniker “Ornana”. His freelance career was built on directing, sound design, and animation. In 2012, he was listed on Filmmakermagazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” after (NOTES ON) BIOLOGY won the short animation prize at SXSW. He has directed 10 Vimeo staff picks, including KRISTA which won the first ever Vimeo Staff Picks Award at SXSW in 2018 and inspired BEAST BEAST. He has also collaborated on two short film projects with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and directed a segment of RANDOM ACTS OF FLYNESS on HBO. Danny now lives in Los Angeles with his brother, Will.

Director's statement
"I have a tendency to be emotionally affected by local news stories. I’ll find myself internalizing events, casting characters and settings from my life, putting myself in it and restaging from the different perspectives involved. How would I handle this? Would I react with grace, or would it break me? Would I keep driving? Fight back? Run? Help? How scared would I be? This film was born from that tendency. There were enough articles on home defense scenarios, the complex stacking of fears and firearms, and I kept finding myself shocked at the lack of humanity in how people responded. In the words of interviewees and especially in the comments online these situations become so coldly politicized, and human consideration seems entirely left out. So I built a story around an incident like this and wrote three parts for people I know. I sliced my brain into thirds and gave a piece to each of them—the theater kid, the skateboarder, the filmmaker. And to personalize it further for me, we decided to film in my home town in Georgia. In the streets I know, the school I know, the house I grew up in".