Orange Native's New Movie to Have Special Screening in Connecticut on Friday

WALLINGFORD, CT — A movie partially filmed at Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford and written and directed by Orange native Victoria Negri will have a special public screening at the hospital on Friday night, according to the Meriden Record-Journal.

The Record-Journal reports “Gold Star” will be screened at Gaylord Hospital, where it was partially filmed — along with other locations around New Haven County, including Negri’s family home in Orange — in 2014, in recognition of National Family Caregivers Month. The free screening will take place on Friday, Nov. 18, at 6:30 p.m. Gold Star was previously screened at the Buffalo International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, according to IMDb.com. (Watch the trailer for Gold Star at the end of this story).

Negri, who also stars in and produced the film, wrote it in honor of her father Carmine Negri, who died from complications of a stroke and pneumonia in November 2012 at the age of 88.

The film also stars iconic Emmy Award winning and Oscar nominated actor Robert Vaughn, who died last week at the age of 83.

Negri plays the main character Vicki and based the movie on her experiences on traveling back and forth from New York City to Connecticut to help care for her father after his stroke.

“After dropping out of Juilliard, Vicki drifts aimlessly between her family’s house in Connecticut and an itinerant existence in New York,” the film’s description reads on its website. “When her father suffers a debilitating stroke, she has to become his primary caretaker. Vicki resists connecting with him, and making peace with herself, but finds a way forward thanks to a new friend and a life-changing event.”

Negri, who attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for Drama, wrote on the website that her father’s last year alive was the “the best and worst year I could imagine” and that he “couldn’t speak, move or eat, but my family developed a system of spelling out words on a board (which took hours) until we could figure out what my father wanted.”

She said that her family is “unconventional in every way” with her father born in 1924 and her mother in the early 60s.

“It’s ironic that I feel like I learned the most about my father (and vice versa) in his last year alive,” Negri wrote on the website. “Every second with him mattered. I have fond memories sitting next to him in silence on the back deck, listening to the birds, getting some sun, just being there with him. Gold Star was born from the frustration in wanting to get to know someone when you fear it’s too late, and yet, still not being able to get out of your own way and accept the end of a life. The character I based on myself, Vicki, is not open or close with her father in the beginning of the film. Her relationship with her dad is not as strong as mine was, and his inability to speak tests her need for closure.

“When I wrote Gold Star, I was by my father’s side in the hospital, or sitting in my apartment, mourning the loss of the man I knew, or thought I knew. I hope and know that many people can relate to loss, to not being able to say goodbye, not wanting to, to being in denial, to the lack of a clean ending, and the sense of loss and fear in accepting that you’ll never really know your parents. Gold Star is about acceptance and becoming an adult separate from who you thought you were and who your parents wanted you to be.”

For more on the film, visit the Gold Star website here.

Read the full story at the Meriden Record-Journal here.

Photos courtesy of Goldstar-film.com