Writer/Director Daria Price
Daria Price’s first film as writer/director is Survival Of The Fittest, which won "Best American Short" at the Swansea Bay Film Festival, the "Fusion Audience Award" at Dances With Films, the "Platinum Award for Comedy Short" at Worldfest–Houston International Film Festival, and it was an Official Selection at a dozen festivals. Her produced screenplay, The Nesting, was nominated for Best Film and Best Screenplay at Madrid's IMAGFIC Festival. Her optioned screenplays include Blindsight and Living Proof. She's written adaptations for William Teitler (producer of The Polar Express, The Hurricane). Writers Guild Of America East selected her screenplay Blood From A Stone for a staged reading with Patricia Clarkson. she has taught screenwriting workshops at La Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV. She also works in documentary film, and is currently completing Out On A Limb, a documentary about advances in the science of prosthetics.
Director's Statement
I’m a born and bred New Yorker and most screenplays I’ve written were set in NY, yet the first film I actually made was set and shot in Los Angeles. “Survival Of The Fittest” was initially inspired by a question I kept asking myself when I first visited LA. I’d find myself staring at people because something about them was “wrong.” Their faces and bodies just didn’t make sense. Too much cosmetic surgery had awarded them the peculiar status of being neither young nor old, nor even middle-aged—they were in fact of “no age.” But those were only the extreme jobs—the scalpel-junkies. I soon realized that there were many more who had had at least some subtle work done.
Cosmetic surgery is of course popular elsewhere-- in fact in China it’s the latest craze, with young girls getting “westernized” to improve their status and employability. But there is no place on earth like Los Angeles for total obsession with “self” and “quick fixes”—from exercise and surgery to buff up the outside to recovery and self-help groups to spruce up the inside. And so my first film became a sardonic ode to LA.
If we live in a time when hearts are bypassed and internal organs replaced, is it any less justifiable to fix up the outside, especially when one is bombarded by messages that say it’s good to live longer but not to look like we have-- and not just for vanity’s sake but to remain employable. Hollywood studios have been accused of discriminating against writers over 40, and they’re not even on screen! As an attorney in the film proclaims, “we live in an age when the greatest sin of all for a woman is to age, so why wouldn’t any woman choose the option not to?” Thus, as much as my film pokes fun at its narcissistic characters, it finally does not pass judgment on them and what they view as an evolutionarily imperative “survival of the fittest” in a society obsessed with youth and beauty.
Cosmetic surgery is of course popular elsewhere-- in fact in China it’s the latest craze, with young girls getting “westernized” to improve their status and employability. But there is no place on earth like Los Angeles for total obsession with “self” and “quick fixes”—from exercise and surgery to buff up the outside to recovery and self-help groups to spruce up the inside. And so my first film became a sardonic ode to LA.
If we live in a time when hearts are bypassed and internal organs replaced, is it any less justifiable to fix up the outside, especially when one is bombarded by messages that say it’s good to live longer but not to look like we have-- and not just for vanity’s sake but to remain employable. Hollywood studios have been accused of discriminating against writers over 40, and they’re not even on screen! As an attorney in the film proclaims, “we live in an age when the greatest sin of all for a woman is to age, so why wouldn’t any woman choose the option not to?” Thus, as much as my film pokes fun at its narcissistic characters, it finally does not pass judgment on them and what they view as an evolutionarily imperative “survival of the fittest” in a society obsessed with youth and beauty.