Flood

Credits
2010 (NYU)
Director: Katy Scoggin
Producer: Bella Wing-Davey
Cinematographer: Michael Rossetti
Production Designer: Tina Romero
Composer: Damian Quiñones
Editor: Danielle Morgan
Cast: Rosie Benton, Paul Klementowicz, and Mary B. McCann
 
About
Miriam is on a mission. Yes, she’s an unemployed journalist with two master’s degrees. Yes, she’s single at thirty, and also broke and in considerable debt. But she has a beat on a story that could turn things around. Miriam’s mission is Gordon. Gordon is Miriam’s dad. He’s on a mission too. For ten years he’s lived in the Mojave Desert, where he runs a paleontology museum and leads school groups on fossil hunts. Gordon is not your average fossil expert. An evangelical Christian, he believes that the earth was made in days, that people and dinosaurs bumped into each other in the jungle, and that the fossil record is a result of Noah’s Flood. Miriam knows her dad’s creationist views because he raised her to be one. But that was an ice age ago. Now she’s an adult with a one-bedroom in Brooklyn and no interest in God. These days she thinks of her dad’s beliefs more as fodder for This American Life than as anything serious. And what tasty fodder it is: TAL is interested in featuring Gordon’s story in an upcoming episode, “Pseudo.” They want material. Armed with a list of questions and a sound recorder, Miriam ventures west to interview Gordon about what made him a creationist. But getting Gordon on tape is a lot more challenging than Miriam had imagined. She faces setbacks as merciless as acts of God. And in the end, she begins to realize that the thing she really needs from her dad might not be an interview after all.