This May, a woman is desperate and injured in the survival thriller Distress Signals, written, directed, and produced by Terence Krey and Christine Nyland.
In the film, “When a fall down a steep rock face separates her from her friends, Caroline finds herself stranded. Now, alone and with a dislocated shoulder, she must make her way out of the woods–and contend with how she got there.”
In 2020, as the world ground to a halt, we – like everyone else – found ourselves canceling our plans. In our case, that meant shelving the film we’d intended to make that summer, even though we were more restless than ever.
Desperate for something to hang on to as the world turned upside down, we briefly considered making a screen movie, but far too much of our lives had already transitioned to zoom, so our conversations turned toward isolation and depression – and the antidotes we craved. We wanted to do something together. We wanted to escape the walls we’d been surrounded by for months. We wanted horizon lines. Directors Terence Krey & Christine Nyland said.
We followed those impulses into the woods – with the most pared down team we could imagine – and found a meditation on survival, and a growing interest in how a familiar narrative becomes fundamentally different when there is a woman at its center.
Distress Signals doesn’t just follow Caroline’s journey out of the woods; it asks us to examine why we wait for saviors who aren’t coming, and question what it means to survive.
Dark Sky Films present Distress Signal on Digital and VOD on May 12th.