We recently connected with Sugey Cruz and Greg Poppa and have shared our conversation below.
Sugey and Greg, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
While at Sundance 2023, we were inspired by the Utah Mountain landscape to create a story centered around isolation and a character being ‘frozen in time’ both physically and metaphorically. Subsequent discussions and creative writing meet-ups lead to the creation of the story behind our short, proof-of-concept film “Cold”, which will be premiering this Spring.
Cold tells the story of Carmen, a Hispanic woman who wakes up in purgatory and is given 1,000 days to fix the vehicle in her driveway or fade away into nothing. Throughout the film, Carmen must battle her harsh environment, isolation, and her rapidly declining mental and physical health. Cold is a story of depression, loss, and trauma re-lived on repeat day after day after day. As such we want the audience to feel Carmen’s frustration and pain while on the hamster wheel of despair. Cold explores the pain of losing a child to suicide and a mother’s struggle to move on. There is some levity provided in the film thanks in large part to an adorable pit-bull mix dog that goes by Armando, who provides substantial comic relief.
We’d like to use this proof-of-concept film, along with a documentary about snake-handling, Pentecostal Churches to launch a limited series that is based in the world that “Cold” sets up.
It’s amazing and truly meaningful to be working on a project and a vision that’s so expansive and unique and that has so much breadth that it will take us years to truly complete our vision for it. And most importantly, we are excited to find people who can share in our vision.
Sugey and Greg, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
For Sugey: I’d always wanted to be an actress and be involved in the filmmaking industry but as a first-generation, Hispanic woman who was the daughter of a more traditional family that came to the US shortly after the Dominican Revolution, that never really seemed like an option my parents were going to be overly thrilled to have their daughter leap into out of the gate. After getting a Bachelor’s in History and Government, & a Minor in Theater, Dance and Film and then a subsequent law degree, It took me several years to find my way back to my passion for acting and filmmaking. I started my filmmaking career as a Producer first quite by accident, while being the President of a non-profit for Autism. During that time, I produced a passion project, 4-year from start to finish, Oscar-qualifying, documentary called “The US of Autism”. It would still be a few years before I made my way into the acting world however, but I finally did in 2017 in several shorts and even as one of the leads in a steam-punk, sci-fi film.
Unfortunately, I had 2 short films that I had put significant time and money into that went into the festival circuit right as COVID hit and sort of got lost to the “virtual” climate that became available at the time for networking. It was something but not really the greatest way to make it in the business. Thankfully, I do think on my feet and I decided to learn how to be a COVID Compliance Officer which offered me the opportunity to work on sets in Montana and Florida with big-name actors like Nicholas Cage, Shiloh Fernandez, and Peter Sarsgaard and work with companies like Universal, Blinding Edge Pictures (M. Night Shyamalan) and Phi-Phen Studios.
For Greg: I began my career as an actor and writer in 2016 and worked on several shorts and features before moving to NYC in 2020. During Covid, I moved back home and wrote, directed, acted, and produced my first film “Foxes” a story about two Mesolithic hunter-gatherers struggling to survive. In 2021, I worked with M. Night Shyamalan on his Apple+ show “Servant” as well as 2023 Sundance best short nominee “Weapons and Their Names” and 2023 Locarno International Film Festival selected feature film “Falling Stars”.
In 2022, I met Sugey on a feature film we were both acting in and she was producing called “Transient” and we made a pretty quick creative duo. Since then we’ve worked on numerous projects both in front and behind the camera, “Cold” being our biggest to date. We recently launched our production company “Roaming Shadow Productions” where we look to tell stories about people up close and personal, looking at the ugly and beautiful in great detail. We hope to inspire in our audience a sense of belonging and community, so that they can reach out and practically touch the characters they see.
We both share a vision to bring great filmmaking to the Pennsylvania indie film scene. We believe PA has so much to offer in terms of talent, scenery, and locations and we are extremely proud that our film “Cold” was made of 100% PA-based talent and crew. Every film we make and work on is a learning experience and we plan on building on those experiences to make the best films we possibly can.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
The most recent example we can use to illustrate our resilience as a creative filmmaking team would be our experience on our last film “Cold.” We started pre-production in April 2023 with a clear game plan and a staked crew. We met with our SFX/HMUA team months before production was going to start and literally went through the entire script scene by scene and broke down what Carmen’s physical deterioration process would look like. We also met with our Production Designer, AD and Sound Recordist etc… beforehand and had everything planned. BUT THEN…
Two weeks before we went into production we lost our Production Designer and AD to medical emergencies. We lost our first AC and one of our SFX artists to scheduling conflicts. Thankfully, since we had such detailed pictures of the process for Carmen’s deterioration we were able to find a back-up artist fairly quickly. BUT, less than 48 hours before the production was set to begin, on our drive to the location so that we could do the production design for the film, we lost both our new SFX artist and our on-set sound recordist to COVID!
All of a sudden, we had to find a 3rd replacement SFX hair and makeup artist who could be trained up to do everything we needed to do in those first days of production and our PA’s were quickly trained on how to properly run sound. Thankfully, everyone did a great job and somehow we managed to get everything done and this story has a very happy ending!
The moral of the story is that the work we did in pre-production allowed us to not panic because we had prepared enough and had the resources we needed in place, that despite all these changes we were able to find replacements within our own community at a moment’s notice.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
One of our biggest resources is our acting teacher, Lisa Pelikan. Greg began taking classes with Lisa at HB Studios in NYC in January 2020. One of Lisa’s in class mantra’s is that “by the end of our class journey, we will be making our own films.”
Inspired by her words, Greg wrote and produced “Foxes” using class time to work on his character and using her extensive experience as a valuable resource to bounce ideas off of and seek guidance throughout the filmmaking process as well as navigating the industry as a whole.
After working with Sugey on “Transient” and hearing her and another fellow acting friend discuss a desire to level-up their acting chops, Greg recommended that they too join Lisa’s class. Having both of us attend the same acting class and learning a common actor’s language truly helped facilitate a much more collaborative actor-director relationship when it came to working on “Cold.” Having that common language to pull from allowed us to have a shorthand on set that made it so much easier to really get the performances Greg wanted from Sugey as an actress and that we wanted from one another as scene partners in scenes where we worked together.
The greatest lesson we’ve learned from Lisa is the art of being natural and present on camera.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cold_shortfilm/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094637084184
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RoamingShadowProductions
- Other: https://seedandspark.com/fund/cold-1#story Seed and Spark Page. While our campaign is over, we are trying to get to 500 followers as we are so close and getting there means we have other incentives available to us as a team. This option is free for people that do this!
Image Credits
BTS pictures are from Dynamic Motion Pictures who took the pictures on set for us. The stills are from the film “Cold” which is our copyright.