Vanishing: A Love Story

Please join us for a sneak-peek, work-in-progress screening of the feature-length documentary Vanishing: A Love Story, from filmmaker, Sandra Luckow. This screening is a fundraiser for funds to finish the film. Shot almost entirely on an iPhone X, the film intimately follows the journey of novelist and Oregonian Cai Emmons as she battles ALS during the last six months of her life, and still asserts her agency. Her heroic husband, Paul Calandrino, turns ALS into A Love Story.

To quote Cai Emmons, “This isn’t going to be a grim film, I promise.”

The film uses advanced AI voice-to-voice technology to create the posthumous narration of Cai’s actual voice using the words from her blog about her experience.

About the Director

Sandra Luckow (Producer - Director - Editor) is a Mexican-American filmmaker who founded Ojeda Films, Inc. in 2000 to bring a bi-cultural voice to independent film. She is known for Sharp Edges, Belly Talkers (1996 Sundance US competition) and the multiple award-winning, That Way Madness Lies… Sandra has worked at Warner Bros., and Universal in casting, network and cable news programs and daytime dramas. She taught documentary film production at Yale University, School of Art for 22 years as well as producing, screenwriting, camera, editing and acting for the camera at Columbia University, Barnard College, Wesleyan University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Her pedagogy includes democratizing accessibility to modes of filmmaking by using smart phone technologies and teaching all aspects of production. She has traveled and worked internationally giving workshops, most notably with the US State Department’s cultural exchange: Lines and Spaces. She is a member of the Director’s Guild of America and holds an MFA from NYU’s TIsch School of the Arts.