Martina Reese

At the midpoint of a satisfying career in graphic design, Martina Reese met filmmaking and fell in love. And so, the one-time graphic designer and soccer-mom emerged as a guerrilla filmmaker. Since her 2010 debut shorts "Vicky Gets Dressed" and "One Boy" (starring her children and their friends), Ms. Reese has steadily expanded her body of work and fluency in the medium with sleeper hit shorts such as "The Swimmer" (2012); "Bathroom" (2016), "Move," "Pity," and "Trigger Point" (2017); and "Big Break," "Slow Me Down," and "Twins" (2018). Three new additions to the Reese catalog, "Floating Man," "The Librarians," and "Burn," were released in 2019. A super-busy summer of 2019 yielded a long-short anthology, titled "Four Short Films About America," composed of "The Jacksons," "First Date," "Ready To Go," and "Lucky." Production for Martina's feature-length screenplay, "Exile," was pushed back a year by the pandemic; production occurred in July 2021. (Visit the Facebook page @Exilemovie2020 to meet Exile's cast and all-pro production team, and to see behind-the-scenes production photos). With "Exile" on indefinite hold, Martina completed two shorts, "Ghost Train" (a 100% iPhone film) and "Falls the Shadow," a poetic meditation on the beauty of solitude and ordinary human activity. Driven by boredom and frustration, she rallied a few people in her friends-and-family network to shoot some creepy wintertime exterior scenes, an experiment that surprised everybody by developing into Reese's first feature-length film, a horror-comedy titled "Zombie."