'Ripe Figs' directed by Preeshl selected for screening at the Big Easy Film Festival

“Ripe Figs," a film directed by Artemis Preeshl, will screen at the Big Easy Film Festival in March 2018.  

The Big Easy Film Festival. selected "Ripe Figs," directed by Assistant Professor of Performing Arts Artemis Preeshl, for screening in March 2018.

In "Ripe Figs”, Maman Nanaine grants Babette wish to visit her cousin at Bayou Lafourche. "Ripe Figs" stars Keota Geaux Picou, Donna Duplantier and Rosha Washington. Grissom penned the screenplay that features music by Eric Laws and cinematography by Patrick McGinley. Duplantier has played ADA Renee Dufossat on "Treme," Vera in "Bad Moms," Blanche Devereux in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and Jane Trahan on "NCIS: New Orleans." This story is particularly meaningful to Preeshl because her father, F. Warren Preeshl, assisted in financing of Bayou Lafourche’s installation of its first plumbing system. Preeshl served as dialect coach for the Creole accent in “Ripe Figs.”

Ripe Figs LLC first adapted Kate Chopin’s "Respectable Woman," entitled “Inachevé” directed by Preeshl. This coming-of age story is the signature film of Ripe Figs LLC comprised of Barbara Ewell, Kate Chopin’s first biographer, Rachel Grissom, writer and director of 2012 New Orleans Film Festival entry, "The Somnambulist," and Preeshl. The Ripe Figs LLC is devoted to bringing female Louisiana writers to the screen. 

Ripe Figs LLC explores race, gender, and class issues in Kate Chopin’s works that persisted for decades after Reconstruction. underlie the struggles that wracked the post-war decades, the era when.

In April, the film was selected as "best short" at the Greater New Orleans Film Fete. 

Prior to joining Elon University, Preeshl coached New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Philadelphia, Boston and Ashkenazim accents for Hannah Pepper-Cunningham in Mondo Bizarro’s "Way at Midnight," a original multidisciplinary play that confronts loss and being lost from the colonial period to the digital age, that premiered at New Orleans’s Contemporary Art Center in September 2017. Preeshl teaches movement, and improv, reconstructs Anna Sokolow’s lost dances for Elon’s Spring Dance Concert. and coaches dialects and verse for Elon’s "Twelfth Night."