It's been a year and 11 days since I submitted my MFA thesis film to Emerson College. I intended to share my production documentation once I'd recovered from finishing a graduate program while pregnant slash coping with new motherhood. Over a year later, it's looking like I'll never recover. So here it is now.

Behold: the written work I submitted alongside the final cut of Families Can Be Together Forever.

Poster for Families Can Be Together Forever ​created by Rhonda Peck.

I was interviewed for Emerson College Today in advance of Families Can Be Together Forever screening at the It's All True Documentary Festival. Here's the section of the article relevant to my work, as written by Erin Clossey:

Colleen Kelly Poplin MA ’10, MFA ‘16 grew up in the Mormon Church. She says she can trace her family back to the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, complete with stories of moving across the plains in covered wagons, “so it’s a big deal in my ancestry.”

As she grew older, Poplin started to feel that LDS’s beliefs and policies were “damaging” to women, and she began to slowly pull back from the church.  She married a non-Mormon, as a graduate film student at Emerson made woman-centric work, and supported progressive politics. But still, she didn’t walk away from church that had raised her, out of a sense of tradition, family, and identity.
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Then she found out she was pregnant with a little girl.

In 1997, James Cameron's Titanic was the obsession of every preteen girl. I was no exception at thirteen, so I decided to remake the film using Barbie and Ken. Instant classic!
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