Michigan filmmaker's project offers a unique take on famed Blanche Dubois character

In a haunting three-minute film clip, a young woman walks hesitantly through empty streets in Detroit. With the Renaissance Center in the distance, she approaches a street sign and looks up. It is Dubois Street, a name that speaks to her belief that she is Blanche Dubois, the tormented lead character of Tennessee Williams’ classic 1947 play, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

The sequence is a scene filmed in September for an independent movie that Barbara Neri is hoping to start shooting this summer. To spread awareness and raise funding for the low-budget project, she is going into the community and holding events like the one scheduled Sunday afternoon at the War Memorial in Grosse Pointe Farms.

It’s a chance for movie buffs to find out about Neri’s artistic process and her ambitious work in progress. It also speaks to how Michigan’s filmmakers are holding onto their dreams in a state without film incentives.

“The Unlocking Desire Film Project Experience” is a free gathering that focuses on the proposed art house film, which Neri describes as “a drama, mystery, LGBTQ+ feature length film” set in a mental institution where the inmates include the woman who identifies as Blanche. As Neri explains, the character actually is “lost in the tragic world of Williams’ play and emerging from the landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans and the cities, such as Detroit, where survivors are scattered.”

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During her hourlong presentation, Neri will screen concept trailers and two scenes already filmed in Detroit (including the one described above). She'll also offer readings of poetry from the screenplay and excerpts from an unpublished work by Williams that helped inspire her to write “Unlocking Desire." And she'll share the details of her journey with the project so far and discuss its social relevance.

Neri also will address the two things that she is seeking: investors and donors to financially back the film, and a cast and crew that are diverse behind the camera and in front of it. Lansing-born actress Zakiyyah BG, who plays Blanche in the two Detroit scenes, will star in the film.

In mid-March, Neri held a similar event at Detroit’s Scarab Club that drew film fans and arts supporters like Michele Thomas, of Canton, who attended with her husband.

“I just thought her idea for unlocking desire was apropos for the time that we’re in, and also I loved how she connected the dots with Hurricane Katrina and just her whole concept. … I was enthralled,” says Thomas, who expects to be at the War Memorial event.

“Unlocking Desire” is the result of long research process by Neri, a filmmaker, writer and artist based near Ann Arbor in Livingston County. She wrote it first as a stage play that was performed in 2011 at the Marlene Boll Theater in Detroit's Boll Family YMCA. Then she adapted it as a screenplay that went on to win the 2017 Marfa Film Festival screenwriting competition.

Neri says she would shoot the movie primarily in Detroit, with a few scenes done in New Orleans. The screenplay’s action unfolds in the famous Louisiana city, but it contains some flashbacks to Detroit, where the Blanche character was sent for temporary shelter after Katrina, and where her psychic break from reality happened.

As an art-house filmmaker, Neri says she hopes that the Michigan Multimedia Jobs Act will become law. “It will be really good for the state if it does,” she says. The legislation was passed by the state House’s economic and small business committee in April and was designed with help from the Michigan Film Industry Association.

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Michigan’s previous film incentive program, which drew a multitude of movies to the state and supported local filmmakers, ended in 2015.

Neri, whose journey toward “Unlocking Desire” started when a transgender person was murdered not far from where she lives, says the film addresses the healing of trauma with the saving grace of love. In the screenplay, the character of Raoul is the strongest representation of the LGBTQ+ community. Raoul is a gay man who has attempted suicide and whose wife has put him in the institution to sort things out. In her delusion, Blanche identifies him as Allan, her dead husband in the Williams' play.

Although tragedy surrounds both “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Unlocking Desire,” Neri says her screenplay’s ending has a twist that is “very moving, and it’s a very hopeful ending.” Although she is open about other details of the narrative, she wants to keep the conclusion secret.

And she wants to put the vision she has for the project on the big screen, no matter how hard that is or how long it takes.

Says Neri, “Who wants to invest in something that you’re not passionate about? ... What’s its purpose? If you’re just making some film you don’t really care about, that’s not going anywhere.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

“The Unlocking Desire Film Project Experience”

2-5 p.m. Sunday

The War Memorial, 32 Lake Shore Dr., Grosse Pointe Farms

Event is free; reserve a seat at the Eventbrite website.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan filmmaker's project brings 'Blanche Dubois' to Detroit