Sydne Horton has processed her personal story for her latest short film.
The 2013 Carmel High School graduate said “Saturday Ritual” was inspired by a true experience she and two of her best friends had in high school.
“The long and short of it is that a psychic came out to my friends and myself,” said Horton, who wrote and directed the film. “Growing up in Indianapolis, I had never really been exposed to queer figures and never imagined it as a possibility for me. So when that psychic continued to insist that one day there would be an ‘influential’ woman in my life, I became argumentative, defensive and eventually slapped. Years later in college, I found out the psychic was right, and it became a running joke for my high school friends and me.”
The friends visited the Psychic Fair in Indianapolis a few times when Horton was a junior at CHS.
“We just thought it was a silly, fun thing to do,” Horton said. “Our parents didn’t think it was a smart way to spend money. We did it every Saturday for a month.”
At first, Horton assumed that the influential woman was her adoptive mother.
“I thought she was incredible, she changed my life and the medium insisted she wasn’t,” Horton said.
The 12 1/2-minute film had its world premiere at the Palm Springs ShortFest. It then screened at the Wyoming International Festival and LA Shorts International in July.
This is Horton’s sixth short film. She said she has a feature film version of “Saturday Ritual” ready.
“I’m in the process of finding investors and financiers to help me bring the expanded vision of this story to life,” said Horton, who graduated from Columbia College in Chicago in 2016 and works in film production in Los Angeles.
Horton said the film contains comedic elements.
“I wanted it to be more uplifting for the audience because there are enough sad stories for queer kids,” she said. “Instead of coming out, we focused on the character finding her own identity and how funny, embarrassing and weird that can be. What we heard at the world premiere was how funny and relatable it was.”
For more information visit sydnehorton.com
