Bobby Webster - Press - Bluebeard's Wife

Bluebeard's Wife

Ignorance Is Bliss.

When faced with evidence that her husband may have committed a terrible crime, a woman is forced to make a choice. Will she risk the stability of her suburban life to find the truth, or is ignorance truly bliss?

Watch Bluebeard's Wife (flash)...

Details - Synopsis - About the Director - About the Cast
About the Film - Production Stills - Key Art - Credits

Details:

Run time 5mins 30secs - 16mm black and white - 1.33:1
NTSC DV, VHS, BetaCam, DVD - Mono soundtrack
Completed 2005

Synopsis:

A leafy, affluent suburban neighborhood. A respectable middle-aged woman tends her flowerbeds while her husband works in his shed. Realizing she is late for an appointment, she ignores a child's baseball cap she finds in their trash can, and leaves the house. However, returning unexpectedly early, she finds her husband absent and a flyer reporting a missing local girl in their letterbox. Her suspicions aroused, she approaches the shed to investigate. But faced with the choice between knowing the truth and maintaining her comfortable status quo, she discovers that facing her fears is harder than she expected.

About the Director:

Born in Tehran, Bobby Webster left Iran with his family shortly after the revolution to settle in England, where he has lived for most of his life. A world champion debater and former actor - with screen credits alongside Sir John Gielgud, Miranda Richardson and Emily Mortimer - Bobby most recently spent several years working for one the UK's leading political think-tanks. He moved to New York in 2004 to pursue his dream of directing films. He now lives in Brooklyn, where he is working on several fiction and documentary film projects.

About the Cast:

Joan Barber has extensive stage credits on Broadway and in regional theatres throughout the United States. Her voice can be heard on the classic Disney films Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and Pocahontas, as well as the indie classic Trick. She has recently completed shooting on the feature film Harper is Missing.

Norm Golden's recent principal roles on film include Madness and Genius, Stolen Moments, and the soon to be released Pickpocket and Urchin. TV appearances include Law and Order - Criminal Intent.

About the Film:

Bluebeard's Wife really arose from the confluence of two separate ideas I'd been developing in 2004. The first was a fascination with the wives of several recent affluent, middle-class killers in the UK and the US, who maintained through their husband's trials - and beyond - that they never had any suspicions of the gruesome crimes taking place under their noses. I really wanted to explore the decisions that these women must have made to remain in a state of comfortable ignorance: denial is a very powerful force in all our lives, and seeing it expressed in such extreme cases speaks, I think, to our own everyday self-deceptions. At the same time, I was working on ideas based on the European folk tale of Bluebeard. A sort of a spin on the Pandora myth, it follows a newly married wife who gives in to temptation and opens the one forbidden door in her wealthy new husband's castle - a story centered on the competing instinct of curiosity. Bringing the two together, I wanted to find a single moment which sums up the tension between these two very human impulses.

Production Stills:

Click on the images below to open enlarged versions.