ST AUGUSTINE, Fla. (January 12, 2024) – Harkening back to the earliest days of the silver screen, the Saint Augustine Film Festival welcomed guests for a complementary showing of the silent film ‘Queen of the Night’, as part of the opening evening’s lineup on Thursday.

Presented by the St. Augustine Film Society, President Joe Marx hosted a question and answer with writer, producer and director Neil DeGraide, who crafted the story during the 2020 COVID lockdowns.

“I noticed that Hollywood had shut down so I thought it was time to make a film,” said DeGraide, working on various roles for the film with his family.

“I’m a recording artist, my wife and I, we did all the music you heard. We wrote the film, got a bunch of friends together, came down to St. Augustine, shot the backgrounds here. In fact, a lot of the stuff in the city was actually taken apart, and put in the film,” he said.

As the first silent movie filmed in St. Augustine in over 100 years, the silent fantasy film featured iconic locations around the Nation’s Oldest City including the Lightner Museum and Flagler College.

As a recording artist, DeGraide paid tribute to the craft of storytelling through visual cues, emotion, and music.

“The silent film choice was easy for us. These are some of my like favorite types of films. Artists are using these expressionistic styles to get across these bigger ideas,” said DeGraide.

He enjoyed describing behind-the-scenes antics he experienced as a first-time silent filmmaker with his team, that had audience members laughing.

“I am so happy that Neil DeGraide has decided to make this metropolitan, magical fantasy come to life on the screen,” said an attendee.

Steeped in symbolism, DeGraide shared tidbits of meaning for eagle-eyed viewers, hoping to leave much of it to interpretation by the viewer.

“Typology, symbolism, mythology, this is my wheelhouse,” he said.

“If you start paying attention to how you tell stories to each other, you realize that you’re using metaphorical, mythological, symbolic language all the time. I’m not a particularly huge fan of realistic story telling. I think realistic storytelling, realism, is good to a point, but it can’t tell as big of a story. (It) can’t tell a story about everything all at once, so we use a lot of symbolism.”

From names to imagery, ‘Queen of the Night’ offered a fantastic journey through the imagination of time and space.

“Every aspect of the film we considered how many layers deep of symbolism we could put into it,” shared DeGraide.

“Even like little clever ones, with the name ‘Oliver Graves’ (main character), right. The name Oliver Graves, like you say ‘all of our graves/Oliver Graves’. If you look at his outfit, he has white shoes, which you might have thought was an odd choice. If you notice until the end of the film, he never comes down to Earth, he’s always above people walking on clouds.”

“We see these things connected in reality. There’s a weird like fever dream way you could put that into mythology and fairy tales where you start to show people the connection that they’ve already recognized as happening in the world, but in a different way.”

The Saint Augustine Film Festival features a full lineup of domestic and international films of all genres, and runs through Sunday evening, January 14, 2024.

Details at https://www.staugfilmfest.com/.

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