Episode 242 - Zina Brown, The Faerie Rings
Episode 242 is the 40th episode of Season 4.
Today we're joined by Zina Brown, the writer and director of The Faerie Rings, a live-action feature film he describes as a fairytale about the war on drugs, somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and 1984. He is a New York director who came up making music videos and moved into short films, including Dreams of the Last Butterflies, which screened at festivals around the world and picked up a run of awards. He has worked with plant medicines for most of his adult life and sees the film as a way of giving back to them. The screenplay has won 17 awards across 55 festivals, including Best Screenplay in Mexico City, Vienna, Kyiv, Amsterdam and San Antonio, and the film recently secured its first investment.
In this one, Zina tells us the story of The Faerie Rings. Simon is a young artist living in a grimmer version of America run by three overlords called the Truthsetters, and the one thing they cannot control is a ring of mushrooms said to grow deep in the forest. He finds the last one, steps inside and meets the cannabis, mushroom and ayahuasca faeries, who Zina is quick to say are not the Disney kind. We talk about how the script grew from a short into a feature and how many of its turns came to him in the middle of a ceremony. He tells us about the Shipibo tradition he sits with and why he thinks a hopeful story about resisting tyranny matters right now. He also gets into the real cannabis faerie costume his partner Madeline Bell made out of silk leaves. We close on where the film stands now that producer Gavin J. Behrman is on board and the first investment is in.
Connect with Zina on Instagram at @zinarcotics and see the concept art at thefaerierings.com.
Enjoy the show!
