While growing up in the First City, Emilio Torres always knew he was going to make a movie.
A recent graduate of New York University's film school, Torres arrived back in Ketchikan early in July to work with a cast of local actors and friends from film school to bring his debut short film, "The Ladder," to life.
Torres, who moved to Seattle from New York City, described the project as a philosophical sci-fi short film about a fisherman who is confronted with a choice to change his life forever.
Filming took four days in Ketchikan. Torres hopes that he will be able to enter "The Ladder" into film festivals. He attributed much of his longtime interest in film to a Ketchikan childhood.
"I grew up in Ketchikan and that was kind of my way into the whole world of filmmaking, because when I was younger I did theater," he told said. "Thanks to First City Players, I had a lot of opportunities to be in theater and involved in theater growing up. And so, because of that, I became fascinated with acting, performing and storytelling (and) directing. That's always what I wanted to do."
Torres wrote the script for the "The Ladder" in 2019, but had to table the project due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Along with a crew of film school associates and other friends - some from Ketchikan - he was ready to get back to business. "There's an excitement just in the fact that I finally get to make it, but there's also like the aspect of, you know, I grew up here in Ketchikan and when I was a kid, I dreamed of going to film school," he said.
In "The Ladder," a fisherman has a big choice to make when a bio-technology company called Actilife makes available a voluntary procedure to transplant older individuals' consciousness into a 21-year-old body.
"In essence, they created a way for older people in our communities to restart their lives, if they so choose," Torres explained. "And in the film, it explores Ketchikan, because it is kind of being used as a test city to see how this procedure would work."
The storyline follows a fictious First City fisherman named Arthur, portrayed by local Keith Smith, who is given the opportunity to complete the procedure.
"And so the film is about whether or not he does this procedure," Torres said. "The film is really just about (if) an older Alaska fisherman would or would not want to restart their life."
Torres said he always had an obsession with the idea of "starting over."
"I'm always like, 'Oh, well, if I just go back to this year or this day, you know, I can change it ... or if I just had more time, I could do this," he said. "That's always been on my mind in general. But you know, really, what the movie's about beyond just that concept is how family dynamics change as you age."
The recent graduate also was inspired by his own developing understanding of how he relates to his family as he gets older.
"Our main character struggles with whether or not to do this and also how to go about telling your son if he wants to do it," he said. "And that came from me, you know, I wrote the script and I went to college and it was kind of the first time as an adult (that) I was interacting with my parents as another adult. And so, it kind of clicked for me to be like, `Oh yeah, my relationships with these people are different and they're always going to be different."
He hopes the movie shows that shifting family dynamics can be positive.
"But of course, it's a challenge and how you navigate it in our modern day world is pretty, pretty crazy," Torres added.
The movie's namesake was derived from the salmon ladder in Ketchikan Creek near Married Man's Trail and Park Avenue.
"The reason the movie's called `The Ladder' is because it's a metaphor for the salmon ladder," Torres said. "And when I was a kid, I used to think about how the salmon ladder is so interesting because we learn in school that salmon are in the ocean, and then when it's time for them to spawn, they swim up the creek. They go up the ladder and then they'll spawn and have their children and then die."
He continued, "And that was always really profound to me, even as a kid, because I used to think are the salmon aware when they hop up the ladder in some weird spiritual way that they're accepting the end of their life?"
Torres' thoughts about salmon became part of the movie, inspiring a scene involving a discussion about salmon between the main character and his daughter-in-law.
While there wasn't a formal casting process, Torres said that there were auditions. He noted that he pictured Keith Smith in the role of Arthur as he wrote the script two years ago, having known him for many years before writing the movie.
"Then it became a question of casting the other actors," he said, adding that he simply reached out to people in Ketchikan.
"I was planning to make it in May of 2020, but obviously in March when the COVID-19 pandemic first started, at that time, it did not feel right or responsible to make the movie," Torres said. "So I went ahead and postponed production. And at that time, I really didn't know when we were going to make it, because at that point, none of us really knew what this pandemic was going to be."
With the production on pause, Torres graduated early from NYU's film school.
He said that in the past year, he decided to aim to start shooting the film this summer. He raised about $17,000, which went toward production costs such as equipment rental and insurance and other fees.
Torres said that the next step is to start editing the footage from the filming process in Ketchikan when he returns home to Seattle.
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