Indie-filmmaker and St. Louis native David A. Malone has known he needed to make October 11th for most of his career. Since writing the film’s first draft in late 2021, Malone has made eight iterations of the script.
“I wanted to make sure I got it right,” Malone says. “The emotion needed to be there.”
After two years of script revision, casting and planning, he’s finally ready to begin shooting the film. Yet, it faces a major challenge — for production to stay on schedule, Malone must raise nearly $35,000 in just under 30 days. He is trying to do so through a Kickstarter, which will close on July 4.
October 11th follows a young, queer couple as they prepare to come out to their families. For Malone, this project is personal — so personal, that he carries the script with him at all times. He says he writes a piece of himself into everything he works on: bits that pay homage to his love of Mexican food, quips and puns redolent with his dry humor, experiences pulled from his identity as a queer man — all additions that he feels “weren’t intentional, only natural.”
As he cites scenes, he thumbs through the script delicately but never at the expense of accuracy — he mumbles lines of dialogue to himself as he scans the script for various scenes. In one scene, the two leads, Kieran and Jonas, played by Abram Cutshall and Ayo Akinokun respectively, share a train car with a woman reading a headline about a new anti-LGBTQ bill.
While Malone thought his piece would be timely, he didn’t anticipate the film’s resemblance to reality to be so stark. Since the beginning of this year's legislative session, the American Civil Liberties Union has flagged 48 Missouri bills as anti-LGBTQ out of 491 nationwide.
“The queer community is under attack every single day. It's my job as an artist to shine a light on that, to show people that this is the world we live in,” Malone says.
Malone fell in love with the arts in St. Louis. Evenings at the Fabulous Fox Theatre first called him to the stage. It was after attending a performance of Johnathan Larson’s Rent at the Fox that Malone was first forced to face his sexuality.
After listening to Malone rave about the genius of the production on the ride home, Malone’s mother bluntly asked if he was gay. At that moment, he remembers “ugly crying.” At that time, Malone was volunteering with his family’s church, and he feared his coming out would jeopardize his position within the church and within his community.
Themes of race, sobriety and mental health weave throughout the script, but the journey of coming out remains on the forefront. Through a tender depiction of Kieran and Jonas’s lives on the lines of intersectionality, October 11th finds its footing.
“We live in a world that doesn't make it easy to be different,” Malone says. He hopes the film will spark reflection in the audience and perhaps even inspire viewers to be more accepting of both themselves and others.
For Malone, creating “October 11th is an act of both solace and self-preservation. But as the necessity of $38,000 looms over production, the film lies in limbo. The film’s Kickstarter campaign is classified as an “all or nothing” — if the goal of $40,000 is not met, all donations will be returned, and the film simply will not be made. The money is needed for equipment rentals, salaries for predominantly local cast and crew and for food during the eight consecutive day shoot in St. Louis. So far, the Kickstarter has raised just over $5,000.
“It's been hard. We are a completely local indie film,” Malone says. “My roots are [in St. Louis]. I want to drive filmmaking, especially indie filmmaking, here.”
The October 11th Kickstarter can be accessed at kck.st/3nvAPtV, and the campaign closes at 4:38 a.m. on July 4.
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