By Casey Jarmes | The News-Review
KEOTA – “The Gates,” an indie film directed by Keota graduate Tiffany Ketcham, was shown at the high school auditorium on March 15.
“I graduated from here in 2007,” said Ketcham. “I was in ten plays while I was here. The first one I was ever in I was actually twelve-years-old. I turned thirteen on our show date. I was the owl in ‘Winnie the Pooh,’ and so I have very fond memories here, and I just wanted to bring this to the community and show what you can take from doing plays in high school and where you can go with it…I wouldn’t be able to do the fight choreography without my years in EagleRock! I would not be able to do my directing or acting if I wouldn’t have been on this stage for ten plays in high school. So I’m grateful to be back here.”
The film, which was filmed in Knoxville and Newton and had a miniscule $8,000 budget, starred Ketcham’s husband Andrew as Alec Black, a con artist murdered by his business partner, who convinces the gatekeeper of the afterlife to let him come back from the dead.
“I actually wrote it as a really bad musical where the con man goes to the bar and starts singing a song. It was really terrible,” said Tiffany Ketcham. “And I kinda stepped away from it for almost a year and a half, and then I had an idea to make it all work, and I rewrote it probably in three weeks. From the time I started writing it to the time we got it up to the theater in Newton took two years.”
Ketcham plans to have the film appear in the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival in April and be judged by the Iowa Motion Picture Awards. She plans to release the film to the public in late April, depending on what it gets nominated for. Her next project, a short film starring children called “Littles,” is currently 40% funded.
