Politics and movies make for occasionally fruitful bedfellows – think JFK, Lincoln, Nixon or more recently, ‘Jackie’. Presidential candidate and popular-vote-winner Hillary Clinton is next to get the political biopic treatment – though the focus will not be on her political career. When I’m a Moth, in development now, will be set in Alaska circa 1969, and focus on her mysterious gap year between graduating college and beginning her career in law.
Writer-director duo Magdalena Zyzak and Zachary Colter, fresh off their SXSW hit A Critically Endangered Species, have just completed filming on the project, which stars indie mainstay Addison Timlin as the 22-year-old future First Lady and would-be President.
Clinton’s gap year has developed something of a mythology among Clinton fans and detractors alike. She ostensibly spent the year working odd jobs in Alaska, providing for herself by “washing dishes and sliming fishes”, tales Clinton was keen to play up during her campaign.
“It’s not a biopic; it’s about how politics makes you not real,” Cotler told *The Wrap. “It’s about the unreality of politicians,” Zyzak added. “It’s part of this diptych on female power.”
It’s not Hillary’s first entry on the big screen: a 2016 conservative-funded documentary entitled Hillary’s America was described by one critic as “the cinematic equivalent of a drunk man at a sports bar sucking back whole jalapeño peppers hoping for applause without ever being dared”.