Cherry Blossoms in March
Most teens and adults in their early 20’s are thinking about college and their futures, but Jessica has Cystic Fibrosis, a terminal illness. Through Jessica’s art, poetry and the close bond with her Mother, she navigates life with prolonged hospital stays, an inability to keep up with her peers physically and even a near-death experience (NDE). After an intense double lung transplant, Jessica is finally able to be like everyone else, normal. She dives head first into living life to the fullest, knowing that it could all disappear with the slightest sign of sickness. But it’s not her life that she worries about, it’s what her mom will do without her when the inevitable happens.
Riley Rheyan attended the award winning Vancouver Film School in 2011 after graduating high-school with an arts bursary. After Film School she began working in the film and television industry and working on indie projects exploring writing and directing.
In 2015 Riley was accepted into the Fulfilling Young Artist Mentorship Program with Kyra Zagorsky (Continuum, 2015) as her Mentor. Shortly thereafter she worked on the award winning Crazy8’s film “No Reservations” as a Production Manager.
Riley continues to work on Union projects as a producer or director assistant, taking every opportunity to learn on the job and has worked with some amazing industry mentors including David Heyman (Harry Potter Movies, Producer), Bill Johnson (I love You Man, Producer) and Cinco Paul (Despicable Me, Writer).
Riley’s latest project “Cherry Blossoms in March”, won over 11 laurels for the script. Her script “Bleed” won the worldwide Raindance 3-2-1 screenplay competition 2020 with a debut screening in London in 2021.
The title ‘Cherry Blossoms in March’ is based on my sister Jessica’s favorite flower, the cherry blossom, which just so happens to bloom and fade in March. Poetically, Jessica was born in March and passed away in March shortly before her 24th birthday. The day she died was the earliest I’ve ever seen the Cherry Blossoms bloom.
A few years after, my step-mom was ready to look through Jessica’s belongings to figure out what to keep. This is how I found her poetry, a whole other side to my sister that I never knew, all there in writing. This was the moment I knew I had to make a film.
I developed the script based off of one poem that particularly struck a chord with me, ‘Spontaneous Combustion’. In it she described what it felt like to die, the moment she experienced her NDE (near death experience) and what going through a 14 hour double lung transplant was like while on a cocktail of medications. I wanted to explore the emotions and disorientation of her experience, through film.
I started writing while also reading more about how she felt, talking to doctors, therapists and all these people who are supposed to guide her through navigating life and death situations while never experiencing such things themselves. The irony.
I decided to focus on the relationship between her and her mother and her struggle to feel normal and live the life she wanted while living with cystic fibrosis, a terminal illness. In order to express her experiences as truthful to her as I could, I incorporated her artwork and doodles from notebooks, sketchbooks, and school work into the film as an expression of her inner life. In her own words ‘my body just can’t keep up’ so instead her world was drawing, art, poetry and video games. Everything you can do from a hospital bed.
This is the world she lived in, and the world many CF patients live in. It’s completely different from my own world and through telling her story I’ve been able to understand her so much more deeply than I did when she was alive.
This version of the film is a festival cut at 7min in length which is part of a longer film 17min and 47sec. All other aspects of the film (cast, crew, cost) listed is based on the full version.
My hope for this film is that it offers a glimpse into an entirely different life, with different rules, different circumstances and allows people to imagine what life would be like as someone with CF. It’s a rare disease that doesn’t have much representation in media or art and my hope is that her story raises awareness of people living with cystic fibrosis and what they go through.