Colors Run
Directed by Olivia Carter, Colors Run follows the unlikely friendship of a broken old soul and a young imaginative girl. She dreams of an imaginary circus while he just wants out of this town to start a new. They never knew their paths would cross, much less they would save each other’s lives.
Olivia Carter is an award winning 16 year old Lake Travis High School Student Filmmaker from Austin Texas. Colors Run is her second narrative short film after her work Round and Round was screened at over a dozen festivals across the United States winning awards such as best story teller and best emerging filmmaker. Olivia has also won grand prizes for her promotional films at EarthX Film Festival and Reel in the Votes Film Festival that was judged by Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, Ethan Hawke and Cathleen Sutherland.
My first thought of Colors Run was when a friend told me she was volunteering at a church where she helped kid refugees from the middle east that are in major war at the moment. She said the one thing that amazed her time and time again is that every single one of those kids have gone through so much hardship in their short lives and yet they still smile. They are happier than ever even after being in the middle of a civil war among countless other things. That’s where my main character Check was born with the story of Colors Run to follow. Kids just have such resilience through the toughest of stuff and I thought the one thing that could keep her sane would be an imaginary circus. Just the juxtaposition of such a wonderful almost fantasy world full of jugglers, and flamethrowers, lions, tigers, ect and in reality it’s all a broken home. The broken life she has that she can’t bring herself to face or else everything around her crumbles. I also wanted to address the fact that Texas is the leading state in human trafficking. This issue is not talked about enough and as a filmmaker I wanted to bring it to light.