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		DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
While gay and lesbian cinema has become widely celebrated among the festival circuit, I feel that most contributions to the "genre," if you will, remain marginal. Both short and feature films made by the LGBT community generally tend to approach "queer" cinema as something exclusive to the minority community itself; it is, in other words, "our" cinema, not yours. The problem with this is that as long as films are designed to appeal specifically to only four percent of the population, audiences will remain very small and production values, which are notoriously lacking in LGBT films, will never increase. My goal with "Swimsuit" was to make its gay themes dissolve completely into the background of a universal love story without losing, ignoring, or marginalizing the characters' identities. Everyone knows what it's like to become intrigued by a stranger. Everyone knows what it's like to want what you can't have. I hope that both heterosexual and homosexual audiences will have a very personal response to the film. "Swimsuit" is largely a film about environments. In sixteen minutes, it is typically difficult to imbue a narrative with genuine emotional weight. Luckily, God was on our side. The emotional arc of the film became determined by the weather itself: a stormy day at the beach slowly transforms into a peaceful sunny haze and ultimately ends in the sparkling glow of sunset. We shot the film using only natural light, manipulating it through painted lenses, so that in the end, the characters' feelings were visually represented not only in the actors' expressions, but also in the texture of the frame itself...in all the negative space. This shoot was very short, and we involved as small a crew as possible (maybe two or three people besides the actors and myself). I think the intimacy of the film, and the wonderful performances of Matt Brown and Kyle Sachs, would have been compromised had we shot it any other way. I am a firm believer that you don't need a lot of money or a lot of people to make a beautiful film. The cumulative effect of "Swimsuit" is the result of combining small decisions (the color of a t-shirt, a flirtatious glance) with the magic of nature (I would have never thought, for instance, to storyboard sunlight glowing on the wet sand). Employing a such a tiny crew gave me the freedom to approach the settings and the characters with an inquisitive eye. I hope that the result is a lively and honest film, one that explores the mysteries of attraction, both platonic and romantic, a little differently than films past--again, with a reverence for the emotion rather than the sexual orientation.                                                                                                                                                                                       -- Mark Thiedeman