Preeshl, assistant professor of performing arts, directed "Ripe Figs," a reconstruction-era film that premiered Oct. 15 as an official entry in the festival's Louisiana Shorts category.
A short film directed by Artemis Preeshl, assistant professor of performing arts, premiered Oct. 15 at the New Orleans Film Festival.
“Ripe Figs” is a coming-of-age story in which Babette wants to visit her cousin at Bayou Lafourche. “Ripe Figs” is the signature film of Ripe Figs LLC that is devoted to bringing female Louisiana writers to the screen. Ripe Figs LLC includes Barbara Ewell, Kate Chopin’s first biographer, Rachel Grissom, writer and director of “The Somnambulist,” a 2012 official entry in the New Orleans Film Festival, and Preeshl.
Preeshl recorded ADR as a yoga instructor in Grissom’s “The Somnambulist” in 2012 and coached a New Orleans accent for Aunjanue L. Ellis, the jazz singer with Alzheimer’s disease, in “Una Vida: A Fable of Music and the Mind” in the 2014 New Orleans Film Festival. Preeshl’s father, F. Warren Preeshl, was a bond salesman who sought out towns without water towers and coordinated a bond issue to install the first plumbing in Bayou Lafourche.
“Ripe Figs” stars Keota Geaux Picou, Donna Duplantier and Rosha Washington with a script by Rachel Grissom, music by Eric Laws and cinematography by Patrick McGinley. Duplantier played ADA Renee Dufossat on “Treme,” Vera in “Bad Moms,” Blanche Devereux in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and Jane Trahan on “NCIS: New Orleans.” Ripe Figs LLC began with critic Barbara Ewell and filmmaker Rachel Grissom’s adaptation of Kate Chopin’s “Respectable Woman,” entitled “Inachevé,” which was also directed by Preeshl.
Prior to joining Elon University, Preeshl coached New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Philadelphia, Boston and Ashkenazim accents for Hannah Pepper-Cunningham in Mondo Bizarro’s “Way at Midnight,” a original multidisciplinary play that confronts losing and being lost from the colonial period to the digital age, at New Orleans’s Contemporary Art Center in September 2017. Preeshl teaches acting, movement and dialects.