Space Between Breaths was named the Best Documentary by the Sweet Auburn International Film Festival. The film festival was an integral part of SpringFest, an annual celebration in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn Historic District that ran from May 7-11,2008.

SAIFF 2008 Winners:
Best Documentary: Space Between Breaths
Best Short Film: The Doll
Audience Choice Award: Deliverance In The House
Best Animation Film: Raccoon &Crawfish
Best Screenplay: Predestined
Best Music Video: Revolution
Best Feature Film: Mr. Bones
 

The documentary will be shown:

August 21, 2008 - The Regent Theatre in Arlington, MA 

See other upcoming screenings
 

The film opens with a series of snapshots, snippets of home movies, and an impending sense of utter sorrow.

A teenage boy smiles on a couch. A little girl with a white ribbon in her hair beams in a flowery dress. A freckle- faced boy tilts his head and squints in an innocent smile. A young man does a back flip into a swimming pool.

As the images roll by, you realize that each one captures a happy moment in the life of someone who is dead.

The pictures continue. One shows a 5-year-old boy in a Bugs Bunny T-shirt, making a funny face as he pulls his hand, gooey with pumpkin guts, out of his Halloween creation and his younger brother throws open his mouth in unbridled little-boy joy. Later, the boy wears a life jacket that looks a little too big as he smiles at the controls of a boat. And still later, he appears again - much older now, a red Santa's hat on his head, his younger brother snuggling with Cassie, their Chesapeake Bay retriever, in front of the Christmas tree.

That boy's name is Matt Kechter. He was killed eight years ago today in the library at Columbine High School.

And his mom and dad, Ann and Joe Kechter, hope their involvement in the forthcoming documentary Space Between Breaths will somehow help others see that they can face their grief, that they can go on with their lives.

"That," Ann said, "you can suffer the most incomprehensible event and still have hope for the future."

You can read the full article about our documentary and the Kechters who lost their son Matthew at Columbine on 4/20/1999 here (Rocky Mountain News).

In the movie Space Between Breaths, there's a moment where a grieving woman who has lost her young daughter to cancer recalls the second she decided not to yield to her grief and let herself die.

She hears a truck coming. She realizes the driver will not see her before the truck hits her, and knows that she can finally end her pain.

In that space between breaths, she decides that she will live.

The death of a child is unfathomable, a despair that changes every succeeding moment. Rosemary and Luther Smith of Beattyville found themselves dealing with that grief, multiplied, when they lost two of their three sons in a traffic accident on the Mountain Parkway almost 15 years ago.

The tragedy led to Rosemary Smith's volunteer work now, scouring newspapers looking for parents who have lost children and offering them packages of information -- which include her own book on grieving parents, a video, CD and a looseleaf notebook featuring poetry and inspirational sayings.

It also led the Smiths to produce the movie Space Between Breaths, in which bereaved parents from around the nation talk about how their children died and how they went on to celebrate the memories of the children they lost.

You can read the full article published on Memorial Day on the front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader here.