Wedding Advice: Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace : About The Movie


Fred Zeytoonjian and I have been together for eighteen years without marrying. At age thirty-five, we began to consider starting a family. Despite external pressure to wed and our mutual commitment, we felt ambivalent about marriage. Were we alone in this? What social and political forces might contribute to this doubt? Our 80 minute documentary feature film, "Wedding Advice: Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace" explores these questions through interviews with family, friends, and "expert" writers, professors, sociologists, and political commentators. Our interviewees hold varying perspectives on and have different relationships to the institution of marriage. Re-framing the traditional question "is there any reason why this couple should not wed?" we ask our chosen community of interviewees: "is there any reason why the two of us should wed?"

As others convey our story in their allusions to us and through their own anecdotes, our documentary illuminates the conflicting desire for and fear of traditions associated with marriage. Sections of the film play off of traditional marriage "scripts" from the proposal onward, culminating in others' "wedding advice" to us.

Visuals include the wedding photography of Kate Philbrick; ironically placed footage from turn of the century films (such as The Bride, 1918 and The Wedding, 1905); and footage from award winning documentarian Jaime Kibben's 1999 home video "The Brides Wore White". Visuals, along with original music, alternately provide comic relief and emotional drama, developing tension between romantic ideals and social realities of marriage.

Our film received a grant for nine weeks of free editing from Digital Media Education Center in Portland, OR where it was completed on September 7th, 2001.

--Karen Sosnoski

Author : Karen Sosnoski