Hey Hey (Feature Film Narrative)

HEY HEY
Feature Film Narrative

Project Type: Feature Film Narrative
Project Status: Pre-Production
Writer and Director: Courtney Romano
Producers: Sara Conte, Allison Koehler, and M. Akram Shibly

LOGLINE

An optimistic but friendless alien comes to earth to make a documentary about the goodness of humanity, but he must face the possibility his movie won’t have a happy ending.

SYNOPSIS

Hey, an alien, travels to Earth after being banished from his planet for asking too many questions. Where he's from, intellect is all-powerful and there’s no need for emotion. But Hey believes human feeling is the key to unlocking the universe. To save himself from exile, he’s told The Committee he’ll prove this by making a doc about human emotion. With an early-2000s camcorder in hand, Hey walks Providence, filming the people he meets in the hopes he can convince The Committee that human life is worthwhile, and saving himself from banishment to the Ultra Deep Field, 13 billion light years away.

Hey meets Ruth, a burned out ER nurse, on a park bench and through their conversation, decides to reveal the powerful mycelium-like network of human emotions by understanding how one human affects the next. He sets off to run a series of human gauntlets, all of them revealing human emotionas muchmore complicated and isolating than he previously thought. Disenchanted with his project and as the pressure of a human body begins weighing on him, Hey's visited by Kip, from The Committee, who's ready to pull the plug on the doc. But in an act of pity (and disgust), Kip gives Hey 24 hours to finish this hopeless film.

Desperate for his film's happy ending, Hey heads back out to the street and interviews the people of Providence about the meaning of life. In doing so, he runs into Ruth and tries coercing her into giving him the scene his movie needs to end happily. When she won't help, he slips and falls on a piece of glass, injuring his human body for the first time. Ruth tries to help him but he won’t let her, not understanding the severity of his wound, and he runs away from her.

While preparing to surrender to The Committee, Hey meets an eccentric old woman who is the first human to acknowledge he’s really an alien. She wisely advises him to look directly at his pain. Once he does, he returns to Ruth to apologize and they both reveal their shared experience of grief. Kip arrives to send Hey to the Ultra Deep Field, and the skies part for him to leave Earth. But Hey chooses an unexpected path: to stay.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT ABOUT THE PROJECT

We have never been more connected and never more alone. This film tells the story of regular working class people pushing through their days and the unspoken weight of their crumbling inner worlds. As a culture, we’ve traded in our capacity to feel for swiping, doomscrolling, and hot-taking. We have lost our emotional muscularity. At times, we’ve simply become afraid of the big feelings we feel. This film creates emotional infrastructure – depth over dopamine – to face the big feelings we’ve abandoned in modern life. This movie isn’t a condemnation of technology, but rather an invitation to the audience to discover an unexplored universe inside of them.

I recently lost my dad. It was a cosmic shift. Though the loss of a parent is generally inevitable, it unmoored me, driving me back to the questions I asked in childhood: Why are we here? And what’s up there?

Even as I ask questions, I too have been fearful of what I might find. It’s taken me years, much of it through writing, to discover my own uncharted emotional territories and realize that my feelings are a gift, not a threat. As a middle class artist, I want to represent the existentiality of the modern American working class with depth, humor, and specificity. I want to give both everyday life and cosmic human emotion their due.

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Meet The Filmmakers

Courtney Romano

Director/Writer/Producer

Courtney Romano is a writer/director. She’s also worked as a consultant, producer, and strategist on everything from NonDē films to celebrity projects. Under her own production company Queens Bird Films, she created the award-winning projects Kinsley Vs. (digital series) and Screen Test (short film), as well as two podcasts, Let’s Go Again: A Philosophical and Practical Guide for Indie Creatives, and The Break Breakdown. She created and runs the NonDē 50 Films Project, a coalition of now 100+ filmmakers dedicated to producing and coordinating 50 non-dependent films this year. In addition to her own film-related Substack, Let’s Go Again, she edits and curates FilmStack Daily Digest, and writes about death/grief on Messier Objects. This year, she’s making her first feature film.
queensbirdfilms.com
Sara Conte

Producer

Sara is a producer whose 20 years of casting experience spans memorable commercial campaigns for brands like Dove and BMW, as well as indie films, Lupe, The Lipstick Stain and The Drought. Sara honed her production skills on- and off-set, helming the background casting departments for several studio-backed TV + Film projects, including The Amazing Spider-Man and Gossip Girl. Guided by her love of creativity and collaboration, Sara continues to build, developing new projects, connecting artists, and producing some really great work that you should definitely watch again and again. Bring friends. Outside of work, she's a dedicated hobbyist and mom to the best kiddo ever, easily her favorite production to date.
M. Akram Shibly

Producer
Akram is a Sundance X ISF Building Bridges Fellow and CAAM Building Bridges Documentary Fund grant recipient whose work in public media has earned him a Webby Award (Brave Spaces), a Telly Award, and an Emmy Award (Compact History). His projects span intimate documentaries, imaginative narrative films, and personal storytelling that explores justice, spirituality, and identity. A Syrian-American with Sufi roots, Akram brings emotional depth and strategic vision to every project. He is a father, and a relentless advocate for truth-telling with heart. Through it all, Akram builds stories that heal, challenge, and resonate across both audio and audiovisual mediums.

trueintentproductions.com
Allison Koehler

Producer/Costume Designer
Allie Koehler is a Brooklyn based wardrobe stylist whose work can be seen everywhere from advertising campaigns, to the red carpet and more. Most recently, she styled actor James Ortiz (Rocky, Project Hail Mary) for the world premiere of Project Hail Mary.When she isn't dressing aliens, you can find her helping female executives feel grounded and powerful through what they wear.

alliekoehler.com