Bloomington hair stylist and mom Stevi Zabawa said when she gets an idea, she goes for it.
Zabawa co-wrote and produced her debut film Nan by calling in favors, recruiting talented volunteers — and a few happy accidents.
It started with a bizarre experience on a family vacation.
“We rented a VRBO,” Zabawa said, “and while we were there the people that rented the house to us never left.
“After that weekend, I got in the car with my husband, and I looked at him and said I’m going to write a movie.”
Zabawa connected with filmmaker Lily Ellora Newton, whose brother is a friend, and the two co-wrote a feature film together called The Lavender Lakehouse.
“Film is just — it’s not like any other path,” Zabawa said. “If you want people to see something, you have to make something.
“We have no money, and this is really just, like, this art-passion-project right now. But how do we let the world see us as actual filmmakers?”
That's where Nan comes in.
‘Which one would you give up?’
The 16-minute short film was shot entirely in Bloomington-Normal, and the story, a screenplay also co-written by Zabawa and Newton, is personal. The main character, Nan, is inspired by her grandmother Mary.
“Her husband left her with five kids, and she had one on the way, in 1960,” said Zabawa. “And she never saw him again.”
Zabawa said shortly after her husband left, Mary got a knock on her door.
“It was the adoption services,” she said.
In Zabawa’s telling, which was written down while gathering an oral history from her grandmother, the woman informed Mary she “had options.”
“If you can’t take care of your kids, you can send them away,” the woman had told Mary. “We can take them and they can have new parents.”
Mary asked the woman if she also had children. She did.
“So, I looked at her and I said, ‘Which one would you give up?’”
“I just can’t imagine that feeling,” Zabawa said.
Nan isn't a carbon copy of Mary. For practical reasons, Nan has three children. And other subtle differences made it more possible to create the film. But the film maintains the broad strokes of her story and its mid-century setting — a time when it wasn’t considered inappropriate to ask a woman to make a choice between remarrying and giving up her children.
Zabawa said Mary forgave her husband. She picked up and moved on, “doing what she had to so,” she said.
“As a mother now, that stuck with me,” she said. “The whole point of Nan being made is the resilience that a woman has and the strength. Any parent knows how much you have to, not suffer, but you have to just hide a lot of raw emotions.”
That bathroom
After eight months of writing, Zabawa and Newton, who co-wrote and directed the film, filmed Nan on weekends over the course of a year. It was made on a shoestring: $5,000, raised through Go Fund Me.
Over half of that went to feeding people.
“Shout out to Pizza Payaa and Jimmy John's,” Zabawa said.
The rest was a series of happy accidents, hard work and scores of creative and talented volunteers willing to work for pizza and sandwiches. Among them: cinematographer Adam Sitton and composer Seth Boggess, who wrote the film’s original score.
Zabawa did the hair and makeup, naturally, and finding locations and set dressing turned out to be some of her favorite parts of the job.
She put out a Hail Mary for an unrenovated 1960s bathroom to complement Nan's opening scene and landed the perfect one. A vintage mint-toned room to bounce off Nan’s Pepto-pink dress found at Butter in Normal.
“It was like walking into my grandmother’s bathroom,” Zabawa said. “My grandmother’s favorite colors were that green and the pink, very pastel. I walked in there and I was like, oh my gosh, it’s gonna happen.”
Those in the know will also recognize a very distinct lobby.
“So, Sam…”
That's Sam Mlot, a friend of Zabawa's who works for the city of Bloomington [She's also an extra in Nan].
“So, Sam took me to the Government Building…”
The Front Street entrance, which appears untouched since the Eisenhower administration, serves as the waiting area for Nan as she applies for a job. A spot in the old Coca-Cola Building was transformed into a principal’s office, where Nan is called to pick up one of her daughters after a tussle at school.
“My cousin, Jan Brandt is an artist in town. I instantly called her and I was like, do you think they’d let me use the Coca-Cola Building as the principal’s office? She was like, oh yeah, I definitely think so…
“Again, it was just so easy to find these things,” she said.
Mary is 92. She has dementia and lives in a nursing home. Zabawa had hoped Nan would be something Mary could watch, see herself in and recognize her story.
“She wouldn’t know what it was, but I know in my heart she would be proud of it,” Zabawa said.
Nan has been accepted into a dozen short film festivals and won multiple awards, including prizes for best director and best short film. The film is streamable on YouTube.
