2026 · A SHORT FILM BY MARTIN GRUJA
BASED A BIT ON TRUTH. AND A LOT ON FICTION.
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It started as a novel about a girl who interacts with the ghost of her dead father. Except he’s returned as a mischievous boy who wants to play and live out his ideal life. What begins as a quest for fun becomes an increasingly dangerous game of chicken – with the girl’s own mind.
I began writing this film as a straightforward adaptation of my novel, A Body or Two. But the more I worked on the script, the less I could ignore the outer story of a writer having to revisit her trauma over and over to “make it perfect.” I wanted to show that when a writer repeatedly forces herself to examine the worst moment of her childhood, it creates its own life-threatening wound.
My goal in both the novel and the film was to externalize the internal: I wanted to make physical what happens inside a child who experiences the death of a parent – the dissociation, the split into the “good one” who exists in the before vs. the “bad one” who couldn’t save her dad.
A Body or Two is my first short film, and I set out to make a great one. The pull came the moment I first read Gwen’s novel: as someone who loves to create magic, I recognized her at once. The kind of person who can’t rest until it’s perfect. That impulse became the heart of the film, and somewhere in the making I came to believe the journey matters every bit as much as the result.
We were surrounded by genuinely gifted people. Whether it’s in costume and set design, in the cast, across the camera department, and all the way through post. My goal was simple: to make something with them that every one of us could look back on and say, “what a great experience that was.” To do that with a story this good, written by someone as remarkable as Gwen, and played by her own daughter, is more than I could have ever hoped for.
Gwen Goodkin was born and raised in Ohio. She lost her father when she was young. She lives in Encinitas, California with her husband and three daughters. She holds a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, with additional study at Universität Heidelberg.
She is the author of the short-story collection A Place Remote, which won the Silver IPPY. She has won the Folio Editor's Prize for Fiction and the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction, has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and was a 2022 mentee of The Writers Lab, sponsored by Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman. Her novel The Plant was a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Novel-in-Progress competition; her screenplay Winnie took the Silver in the Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest.
She has trained at Iowa Writers' Workshop, Tin House, the Community of Writers' Fiction Workshop, the Cinestory Television Retreat, and the inaugural Bread Loaf Writing for the Screen Workshop.
A Body or Two is the closest she has come to writing about what happened.
Gwen wrote it. Then her two daughters showed up to help. Georgina, the younger, plays Young Gwen, her mom at seven. Anya, the elder, wrote an original score track called In A Loop for the film.
Press kit, hi-res stills, poster, key art, and director / writer interview availability.
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