Making Maya

After seeing Rolla Selbak's second film (Three Veils) at a film festival recently, I decided to check out her first feature film, Making Maya (Btw, I got it on Amazon).

I really enjoyed this coming of age story. It was well told and the characters were complex and likable. The performances were good and honest. The film doesn't have the big budget value of Three Veils, but still Rolla managed to tell a good story. I have seem many indie films with big budgets that fail at the story level, and for that alone this film deserves high marks.

I encourage people who watch this film to then see Rolla's second film and realize how far this talented director has come. I am looking forward to her future movies.

Best, KR

This low-budget indie has more to offer than a typical coming-of-age lesbian movie. The focus of Rolla Selbak's movie is not Maya's sexuality, but mainly discovering herself -- what's her passion in life, what she wanna do for college, how to take care of her mother's addiction, and her feelings for a girl and/or maybe a boy next door (I am trying to keep it vague so i don't spoil it for you).

Basketball isn't my favorite sports, but Making Maya made it all interesting for me. The up and coming Selbak highly succeeded in the scenes on the basketball court. She's a filmmaker to watch for.

If you watch this movie with an open mind, you'll accept the limitations of low-budget movies without star actors and you will see beyond that -- the talent of a good director.

In this movie the storyline doesn't follow a real plot, the score doesn't suit the scenes, the writer could have done better and explain things a little further, the only thing well accomplished were the basketball scenes but the film itself is rather bad. It's a low budget film so it's understandable that they didn't do much with the locations and that stuff, but the whole script could have been better, the story has potential but I think the film was too short and the director/writer tried to fit in a lot of things and ended up with three different main plots for a story that only had space for one. As for the acting I liked it but some characters lacked passion.