Toss It

The Producers

Michele Remsen - Director

Michele Remsen is a filmmaker, director, screenwriter, playwright, producer and actor. She is the Founder of Stevedore Productions and Co-Artistic-Director of the Stevedore Confederacy. She attended Bryn Mawr College and holds a B.A. from Barnard College of Columbia University. She studied Shakespeare at the British American Drama Academy: Midsummer in Oxford Program at Oxford University, United Kingdom. Her feature-directorial-debut, Toss It, was awarded the Nancy Malone MAP Grant by NY Women in Film. She is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America East, Film Fatales, Women in Film, IFP and Film Independent.

P.J. Palmer - Associate Producer

P.J. Palmer is a filmmaker of critically-acclaimed and award-winning shows. He has directed, produced and/or written more than 20 narrative short films, documentaries, feature films, web series and commercial projects. He is alumni to the Edinburgh Film Festival Talent Lab and worked as Artist in Residence with the National Steinbeck Center. P.J. was raised in the rural mountains of Northern California and has always loved the art of telling stories with motion picture.

Making The Film

Director's Statement

Toss It began as a one-act play for my LA theater company’s annual show, My Bitter Valentine, that evolved accidentally into a full play, which I then turned into a film script. I jokingly thought it was an exploration of why men are so screwed up, but as I crafted the characters, the story turned into an examination of what or who made them so screwed up and, by extension, of society at large. How people are shaped by traditions, lore, myths. And only the brave or desperate or seekers kick against convention to find some kind of truth that’s their own. Life is often defined by big events, but it’s really in the back hallways that the real-deal goes down. So I peeled back the curtain on cornerstones of Western Civilization to try to figure out a few characters, and stumbled onto things I didn’t know. Much like Finn and Emily: he thinks he can spin everything and she thinks she knows everything, until everything gets tossed -- it’s then both discover what they don’t know -- as I did as I made this film: I begged, borrowed and crowd-sourced enough to get it in the can, and, as I pushed this production through, as producer / director / writer / actor, with a cast and crew who worked for fumes because they loved the project, by the end of an intense 12-day shoot we felt like family - which I think is what most people want: a tribe to which they belong. It’s lonely to navigate the world alone, but sharing what we discover makes it cozier, funnier and a little more joyful.

- Michele Remsen