From Waco to Cannes: Short film ‘The Heart of Texas’ rides buzz to prestigious festival

A short film based in Waco is making its way to one of the biggest movie festivals in the world.

The 15-minute film “The Heart of Texas” is about an aspiring singer whose path crosses in the worst of ways with an undocumented person, right as she’s about to get a big break.

The film has crisscrossed the world at festivals, but now it will be showcased at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival

Gregory Kasunich wrote and directed “The Heart of Texas,” and he joined the Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: I understand you’re actually going back to Cannes in a way. Can you tell me about your film festival journey and how it brought you to this point?

Gregory Kasunich: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been incredible.

We’ve taken this film all the way across the United States. We’ve taking it to Europe and beyond. I’d like to say we’ve taken it from Beloit to Bulgaria. We’ve played it in Wisconsin and all these other places.

And yeah, last year we got into the Cannes Indie Shorts Festival and ended up taking home a win for best original score there and that was my first time actually in Cannes and we had a really lovely time and super excited to be going back.

So you get to go back because you won this award, and I guess it was for the music. And music is really essential to the film. Would you say that’s true?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s a film about music to a degree. The song that our singer-songwriter sings and plays is kind of both thematically a very important part of the film, but also the lyrics and what she ends up saying, and then the score itself, just sort of driving everything along.

As we went into thinking about the score, we really wanted to make sure that it wasn’t competing. You know, we didn’t want like slide guitar and pedal steel and sort of all those classic Texas sounds. We wanted something that was kind of driving and propulsive, which is what we put in there so that it gave the country/western music that’s in the film a little bit of space to breathe.

Well, I have to ask, you are based in L.A., in New York, and I think I read your roots are in Philly. Did you have Texas ties or how did this story come to you?

That’s a great question. Yeah, I’m originally from Pittsburgh, Penn. I did my undergrad in Philadelphia. And then yeah, I reside in Los Angeles, but go back and forth between there and New York and kind of work all around wherever the work takes me.And the answer is no, I don’t have any Texas roots.

But what really brought me down there was a festival – at the time it was called Deep in the Heart, now it’s called the Waco Indie Film Festival – and I submitted a film that I made a few years ago. I got in and I went down and I met the community and I met the people and got to speak with other filmmakers and that’s where I met Lauren Noll who actually ended up working on the script with me and became my co-writer on the project and she’s also the star of the film.

So it all sort of culminated at this festival where I met my collaborator, I met this community and I had this idea for a script. At the time, it took place in Los Angeles and was about an actor and not a singer-songwriter. But as we really explored the themes and we explored the characters and what we wanted to say and after our experience down in Waco, we decided to completely rebuild the script from the bottom up to be a Texas story, which I think was probably the more effective way to tell this story.

So you went back to Waco to film this. Besides Lauren, tell me about the rest of your cast and crew – the Texans that are helping you get things just right.

Oh, we couldn’t have done it without Texas. Honestly, like everybody came on board and was absolutely incredible.

We had Sol Bautista who came on – she’s originally from Mexico but is an American citizen – and she was a cultural producer, and really helped us understand the lived experience of the immigration process and the fears and the reality of what it means to be a documented or undocumented person in the United States.

We had Jordan Ochel from Baylor, who’s a professor there, teacher there. He brought on a whole group of students. So the set was actually a teaching set where we got to teach all the students sort of how a set runs. And they also contributed. You know, someone would stand in or hold a sandbag.

We brought people in from Dallas, we brought people in from Austin. Waco opened their doors both figuratively and literally by providing us locations. And Samuel and Louis from the film festival also came on to set and really provided additional resources and support throughout the process.

So it is very much – even though I’m from L.A. and Lauren and Brent Johnson, my DP, were all from L.A – I mean, the film is really really really a Texas movie.

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Well, you touched on this and meeting Lauren and changing this to the dreams of a singer-songwriter, but it occurs to me that there might be something sort of similar in this idea of being an independent filmmaker, or perhaps an actor, and those dreams.

Is that where your story kind of feels like it’s there?

Yeah, I mean, I think the film, you know, hopefully it’s a very specific story about a very specific situation that deals with a place and a policy and all of these things. But the hope is that the themes and the experiences of the characters are somewhat universal.

I feel like everybody’s trying to search for something or seek something – whether it’s their “American dream” or if it’s just finding success in the arts or finding success in business, it takes a lot. It takes a lotta drive.

And I think, you know, like I’m not a singer-songwriter. I play music a little bit. And I’m not an immigrant, but what I am is somebody who has the lived experience of what it means to really try to pursue the arts with everything that you have and all of the roadblocks and all the desire and all the hard work that goes into that.

And when you feel like you’re close and when you feel like you have a big break, you know, just the urgency of that and what that means and what that feels like… I felt like it could bring that authentic experience to Janie’s character.

So you’ve gotten some Texas cred, too – like official Texas cred for this film. Do you wanna tell me about that?

Yeah, recently we got accommodation from the House of Representatives in Texas. The film was recognized and was given an accommodation for its contribution to the arts and the film landscape in Texas, which has been quite an honor and really unexpected.

But, you know, I hope it encourages more people to make films in Texas. I hope it encourages and inspires other people to continue telling Texas stories. It was just a really, really cool thing to receive.

You mentioned that this film kind of began with bringing another film to Waco for a film festival. That’s sort of an example of what can happen with a short film and traveling to a festival.

So what are your wildest dreams now for what happens next with “The Heart of Texas,” or maybe just you in the future?

Yeah, well, I would say like to your first point, I would encourage anybody who has any desire to make a film to make it, because you never know if it’s going to be that… You know, or write a script or whatever. Put it out there. Go to the film festival, meet people. Even if it is a smaller festival, you don’t know who you’re going to meet.

And I will say that, sort of, every movement in my career, every great thing that’s happened has come from making something and sharing it. So I would encourage everybody to do that.

And as far as the future of of this project and myself… I mean, we got really, really far with our film. We were long-listed for the Oscars and landed on a few prediction lists that thought we might make it. We ultimately didn’t, but I think Lauren and I and my collaborators have talked about doing a feature film version of “The Heart of Texas.”

And I just hope that the film continues to travel, it continues to make an impact, and hopefully the story can expand and be told on a much larger canvas and have an even greater audience and impact.

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