A Student Acadamy Awards finalist, Twitch portrays a young girl's irrational fear that her mother's disability is contagious.
Twitch kicked off the film festival circuit by winning a Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance and going on to screen at over 100 film festivals worldwide: including Cannes, Palm Springs, Brooklyn International, Chicago International, Woodstock, and Clermont-Ferrand.
Twitch has since won over a dozen international awards, including six for First Place. Twitch is also featured on Film School currently airing on IFC.
Leah Meyerhoff is a Brown University graduate and an MFA candidate at New York University. After finishing Twitch , she went on to direct the music video Team Queen and is currently working on her first feature film.
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Twitch tells the poignant story of a young girl torn between two worlds: her domestic life where she must care for her wheelchair-bound mother and her escape into the emerging world of sexuality with her eager, hormone-addled boyfriend..The director..s own mother; a victim of MS, plays the mother with a stark reality that is haunting to watch, and Emma Galvin captures the daughter..s struggles with an understated command that belies the hidden turmoil of adolescent angst that tortures her character.
Independent Film
Meyerhoff easily conveys the neuroses and brutality attendant to an enforced reversal of roles: when the line between caregiver and charge is hopelessly blurred.
Antimatter Film Festival
Twitch is a story about fear, love, and an uncertain future. Galvin deftly portrays a girl who longs for a childhood she knows she can never have because she was forced to grow up too quickly. She can convey both innocence and maturity with just a look, and her future in films is solid. Writer/director Leah Meyerhoff has also secured her place in film with this short movie, which may be a bit autobiographical in nature. She..s done a story that is as honest as it is touching, and there is nothing sickly sweet about it. Her ability to sum up a young girl..s life in ten minutes is remarkable, and it makes the film.
Film Threat
Twitch seems to let the message lie just underneath the surface, waiting to be discovered.
Scottsdale International Film Festival
Twitch is a hard but impressive little film. The travails of growing up, the immense pain of post-adolescence, the terror of the big nasty world resting just outside our windows: Twitch augers in the universal places of hurt in the human brain. We can take solace that Meyerhoff is now working on her first feature-length film. Twitch shows great promise; we now must wait for Meyerhoff's talents to fully bloom.
Film Monthly
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New Filmmakers
7:00pm November 28 2007
Anthology Film Archives
New York, NY
Now Film Festival
May 10 2008
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences
Linwood Dunn Theatre
1313 N. Vine st.
Hollywood, CA
Look and Roll Film Festival
October 2008
Olten, Switzerland
For more information go to www.twitchthemovie.com
