Santa Maria is going a little bit Hollywood, thanks to some local filmmakers.
Cindy Kitagawa was born and raised in Santa Maria and worked in Los Angeles as an aspiring writer and filmmaker. Now she and a group of local and non-local filmmakers are in Santa Maria shooting a feature length film called Coast.
Like many local youths with an interest in art, Kitagawa attended Allan Hancock College and eventually moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in filmmaking.
“I was in advertising for a really long time in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was doing copywriting, and I was also a freelance writer for LA Valley Magazine, so I was always kind of working in the arts.”
Kitagawa and longtime friend and fellow Santa Maria native Wendy Guerrero, an executive producer on the film,* worked together in the LA film industry. They eventually met and began working for actor Bruce Dern, who became a mentor to them.
“We were spending a lot of time with him and working with him on set, assisting him in different ways,” Kitagawa said. “[Coast] started over a conversation Wendy and I had about where we were in our life and how much where you come from affects who you turn into. We wanted to explore that idea.”
Kitagawa said she and Guerrero recognized they weren’t living traditional lives like many of their friends and families. They were moving from job to job and hadn’t started a family. That’s when they got the idea for Coast.
“We were thinking, how did we get there?” Kitagawa said. “Because Wendy and I both grew up in Santa Maria, we really wanted to tell a story about the community, about what it’s like to grow up here.”
Coast tells the story of Abby, a 15-year-old girl who has difficulty expressing herself. She feels trapped by her small town and upended by the breakdown in her parents’ marriage. It’s then that she meets Dave, a lead singer of a band whose band breaks up as well.
The film explores issues of identity at a time before there was access to tools like the internet.
“I was here in the late ’70s and the ’80s,” Kitagawa said. “I wanted to explore what it was like to grow up in a community like this, at that time without an internet. You really couldn’t see was beyond what was in front of you. If you can’t see something else of something bigger and you’re not surrounded by people who are telling you that you can have bigger dreams or go off and see the world, it can feel a little stifling.”
The film is co-produced by Jessica Hester, Pin Chun-Liu, Alex Cirillo, and Dani Leonard and stars Fatima Ptacek, Mia Xitlali, Mia Frampton, Ciara Bravo, Kane Ritchotte, and musicians The Ceremonies. They are working with Women Make Movies, a nonprofit media arts organization that facilitates the production, promotion, distribution, and exhibition of independent films and videos by and about women. The organization accepts tax-deductible donations to help offset the costs for the filmmakers.
Dern is an executive producer on the film, which begins shooting in early August. In a statement, Dern expressed support for highlighting Santa Maria and a story focused on a female lead.
“Santa Maria is special place, and this unique coming of age story reflects the growing diversity of the population of the United States,” Dern stated in press materials. “It reflects a time in all of our lives when we all fought to find our way, and young women are far too often left out of this narrative. With Coast, we seek to change that.”
Kitagawa said the production company chose to stay on the Central Coast to shoot the film because of its unique identity as a location.
“It’s so hard and so expensive to film in California,” she said. “We have had offers to film in Vancouver, to film in Arkansas or Georgia. But there’s no place like it here in terms of the people and the land. It’s a hard journey, but we’re really determined to make sure that this story stays here.”
Anaya Navarro, an arts student currently enrolled at Hancock, is an associate producer on the production. She hails from Guadalupe and says identity issues like the ones explored in the film have always been a part of her life growing up.
“Growing up Chicana with Native-American blood, I have felt multiple identities weaving within me and my connection to my community,” Navarro said. “Unsure of a single space and culture that I belonged to, I constantly found myself beside people of similarly diverse identities.”
Navarro said she always felt drawn to creative arts and started taking classes when she was a student at Enrest Righetti High School. In 2015, her senior year, she enrolled in a film class, which emphasized what it is like to work in real-world film production environments.
It’s also where she met Coast directors Hester and Derek Schweickart, along with Kitagawa.
“The two directors of the film, they moved to Santa Maria for a summer,” Kitagawa explained. “They’re both from New York. They wanted to get to know the community.”
They went to Righetti and met with a class of film students and had them read the script for Coast. Kitagawa said that because the film is a coming of age story, they wanted feedback and notes from actual high school students.
Navarro said she connected to the script’s main character, Abby, a Mexican-American girl from the Central Coast with a single mother who struggles to keep her individuality. Abby’s adventures around her small town help her find refuge and explore who she really is. Navarro started out as an intern with the production and soon moved up to the role of associate producer.
“I’m really inspired to tell stories,” Navarro said. “I am really excited to be a part of this project and I’m really enjoying the filmmaking process. I’m grateful to have found these people who are passionate and want to tell such an amazing story.”
Arts and Lifestyle Writer Rebecca Rose has stars in her eyes. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
* Editor’s note: This article was edited for accuracy.
This article appears in Jul 19-26, 2018.