About the Project
“Pharms” is a psychedelic dramedy that offers a glimpse into the inner workings of bias confirmation via visual and musical whimsy.
It pays homage to a changing city and a changing ethos regarding American healthcare via the toggling dynamics of a brother and sister from San Francisco.
Synopsis
As San Francisco experiences its second-wave Gold Rush in the form of the Techie Boom, a tug of war between pharmaceutical companies and natural healthcare emerges, this time with an emphasis on marijuana and psychedelics.
“Pharms” is a short film and proof of concept for a television series.
While Brian fledges at the family’s pharmacy, his reefer-smoking sister, Sara, surfs and jams in a band. Things turn when their mother’s mental health begins to decline along the vein of Alzheimer’s and Sara learns of her own life-threatening diagnosis. Bound by an inherent love and concern for the family, Brian and Sara must find redemption in the midst of their clashing beliefs of western and alternative medicine.
More to Consider
Aside from staging the well-known issues of big pharma and alternative holisticism in their respective extremes at play, “Pharms” reminds us that bias begets bias. A strange phenomenon of bias confirmation occurs when the judged fulfills a behavior due to an accuser’s anticipations.
Have you found yourself saying things you never say and possibly don’t even believe as though your words were written out for you, as though you were fulfilling someone’s expectations?
This binary thought pattern has inspired the binary code we use to program computers. It involves neural firings and biomagnetism and is responsible for right wing verses left wing, good verses bad. It is also responsible for the impulsive judgements that divide between self and other. In actuality, we share a variety of universal experiences.
Do these binary tendencies continue to serve us or are we ready to evolve?
About the Creator
Writer and director, Molly McGivern, studied psychology and literature at McGill University and trained at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre and Michael Howard Studios in New York.
Having taken up residencies in Japan, Hawaii, France and French-Canada, where she researched “cultural chameleonness,” she experienced how cultural biases not only affect our assumptions of others but also, our own behaviors as recipients of biased judgment, as though we sense judgement and deliver it on a platter. This phenomenon tends to afflict the more sensitive types and explains the ol’ “foot in the mouth” when applied to social biases.
Fresh after September 11th, Molly worked with Theatre of the Oppressed founder, Augusto Boal and directed an Invisible Theatre group in New York City to raise awareness of media-driven fear tactics.
Shortly thereafter, Dramatherapy pioneer, Dr. Sue Jennings gave Molly the honor of directing musical vignettes for the bulibasa of a remote Roma tribe in Transylvania, assisting in his efforts to forge inclusiveness amongst the tribe’s children irrespective of their traditional caste rank.
After moving closer to family in Hawaii, she managed a coffee and macadamia nut farm and worked in public schools where she integrated Autistic students into mainstream classrooms through the subtle use of humor, musical elements and theatrics.
With a newfound love of agriculture, she directed music and theatre-based activities for an organic farming summer school designed for teenage orphans in Mongolia. This inspired her to design an international program that exchanges permaculture practices with traditional Indian farming techniques in the Himalayas.
Molly’s artistic intention is to “build bridges” and inspire people to build their own in any capacity. Unlike most of her work which leans towards the fantastical, she developed “Pharms” as a television series drawing from personal experiences and the autobiographical antidotes.
Given its dramatic socio-political transformations and rich historical impact over global culture, there is no better place to set a series about building bridges than the Golden Gate City, itself.
Partners in Collaboration
We are proudly associated with Scary Cow Film Co-Op and the Center for Conscious Creativity.
We humbly seek contributors to join us and help make this series.