By CAROLYN BROWN
For the Valley Advocate
Though filmmaker Rio Contrada no longer lives in Florence, he’s got plenty of love for his hometown — and he’ll be showing it off when he brings his debut feature-length film back to the Valley next week.
Contrada will screen his film “Splinter” at the Academy of Music on Monday, Dec. 22 at 7:30 p.m.
The movie is about Rosy Looper, a motorcycle-riding school psychologist in training. While working on her her practicum, Looper discovers a second grader exhibiting concerning behaviors, leading her to investigate their cause and confront her own trauma history. Contrada said the concept for this movie derived from a past relationship with a school psychologist who cheated and gaslighted him “with her psychology textbook,” he said. “I started writing this piece at first in this very juvenile reaction of, ‘How could she do this to me, this mental health professional using her knowledge against me?’ And the further I got into the project, the more I realized that was kind of a stupid take, a little bit of a misogynistic take,” he said. Instead, “I really wanted to see it from her perspective and not act as though everything was happening to me.” Contrada reached out to his ex-girlfriend (whose name he did not disclose) to let her know he was writing a movie inspired by that experience, and she agreed to be interviewed to help flesh out the character. She also sent him resources about school psychology, including a worksheet about “the splinter analogy,” from which the movie takes its name. The idea is that when someone has a splinter, “It’s painful to take it out, and a lot of people don’t want to pull the splinter out because it hurts,” Contrada said. “But if you leave the splinter in, it can get infected and fester and become worse of a problem, and it’s very much the same way with trauma. When you have an inner trauma, [it] can very much hurt to come forward about it and speak about it openly. But if you just keep it closed off, it can manifest in other ways in your life and become more problematic.”
Creating “Splinter” also helped Contrada work through his own issues, he said.
Rosy Looper (played by Scout Teyui-Lepore) and her boyfriend Fiore (played by Aaron Ford). / COURTESY RIO CONTRADA
“One of the beauties of the writing process is that you’re able to figure things out about yourself, and it’s very meditative and therapeutic,” he said, “and I think it definitely helped me become a better person as I was making it.”
Though this is Contrada’s first feature-length movie, he’s also directed a number of short films, including one about his late father, Fred Contrada, who was a longtime reporter and columnist for the Springfield-based newspaper, The Republican. The film touched upon his father’s degenerative illness. Beyond this work, much of Contrada’s filmmaking experience came from his time as a production assistant on four seasons of the medical drama series, “Grey’s Anatomy.” Through that experience, he recruited some members of his cast, including Scout Tayui-Lepore (Rosy) and Debbie Allen (Rosy’s supervisor, Mrs. James). Contrada and his team shot the movie in the summer of 2022, and most of its budget at the time came from his own salary.
Once Allen — who has won a Golden Globe and multiple Emmy awards, and most recently, an honorary Oscar — joined the crew, other “Grey’s” crew members joined the project as well: an assistant camera operator provided Contrada with camera equipment for free, and the prop master helped Contrada pull items from the “Grey’s Anatomy” props cage, including hospital beds.
“Without that help, I wouldn’t have been able to make the movie,” he said.
Contrada also credits western Massachusetts for its contributions to the movie. The soundtrack, for example, is entirely comprised of Valley artists, including Sun Parade, Mal Devisa, And The Kids, Mibble, Prewn, Boy Harsher, Jake Klar, and Karlo Rueby. To put together the soundtrack, Contrada reached out to his high school classmate Peter McQuillan, a musician, DJ and radio producer with strong ties to the local music scene. The two went through the script together, and Contrada described the kind of song he wanted for each scene, using examples from mainstream artists as reference points. McQuillan then went through what Contrada referred to as his “mental Rolodex” of music by local artists and offered Contrada options to choose from.
“We ended up with the perfect song for every scene,” Contrada said.
One of those musicians not only inspired the name of the movie’s main character, but also became part of the cast. After seeing Northampton indie folk musician Jake Klar perform his song “Rosy” at a Halloween show, Contrada said he was “transfixed.” When he later found the song on Spotify, he listened to it “over and over and over again.” Contrada also flew Klar out to Los Angeles to perform the song in the movie, in which he plays Rosy’s ex-boyfriend Stephen.
“He didn’t have much acting experience, but he crushed it as an actor,” Contrada said.
What’s more, the aerial director of photography, Caleb Des Cognets, was also one of Contrada’s high school classmates.
“Western Mass. came in strong on this movie,” Contrada said, “and I think, really, the quality of it is a lot higher because of the contributions from people from western Mass.”
Besides helping to boost the western Mass. music community, Contrada is also hoping to give back to the area in another way: all proceeds from this screening’s ticket sales will benefit services for children and young adults at the Center for Human Development (CHD), a nonprofit organization that provides mental health care services in the Valley.
“We’re really grateful to Rio not only for his very kind donation of the proceeds from the screening to our counseling programs for kids and families, but also for his work to raise awareness of mental health challenges, and to make it easier and safer for people to come forward when they need support,” said Ben Craft, vice president of community engagement at CHD.
Contrada said that when he makes movies about social issues, he wants to make sure he’s not exploiting his subjects and that he can give back to them. When Contrada made a short film about homelessness, for example, he screened the movie at the Parlor Room in 2019 to benefit the volunteer-run nonprofit Hampshire Support Alliance, which provides services to those who are unhoused in Hampshire County.
“When we did that, it just really felt right. It felt good,” he said, “and I think it’s a good way for the community to be out supporting the arts, seeing a movie that they’re not going to see at an AMC or a Cinemark, and they also get to support the community.”
With this movie, too, “I’m excited to be able to show it to my community and the people who I grew up with and people who’ve supported me through a lot of the hard times in my life in western Mass.,” he said. “Northampton’s a community that really values the arts, and that’s a big part of who I am, so it’ll be a blessing for me to be able to show people how the community has brought me up to become an artist myself.”
Tickets to “Splinter” are $19.68, fees included, at aomtheatre.com, by phone at 413-584-9032 ext. 105, or at the Academy of Music box office. Card to Culture tickets are also available for $10. The movie is suitable for viewers 17 and up.
Editor’s note: Rio Contrada is the son of nonpaid columnist, Joan Axelrod-Contrada.
