The Un-Marrying Project: Passion Is Easy – Commitment Is Hard
by Karen Tortora-Lee on April 14, 2011
Meet Simon and Kim – passionate. About their cause (we’ll get to that in a moment), about each other (when we meet them they’re taking a cozy bath together) and about their work which (currently) is a documentary film they’re shooting called The Un-Marrying Project. As it stands, this play IS the film. Or is it the other way around?
So passionate are they about their work, their relationship and their cause that it all blends together for them in one big ball of “Here we are! Simon and Kim!” (Exclaimed in unison, no less. Well … after some practice). They’re so deeply connected that they even have joint panic attacks. (Awwww – cute). But is all this passion enough to get them through their act of civil disobedience – The Un-Marrying Project: documenting the process of several married couples who willingly get un-married (yes, also known as divorced) in the name of protest … living apart until ALL people can be married EVERYWHERE? In other words … they’ve decided that until Gay Marriage is legal, no marriage should be valid and several brave couples are taking up the cause, allowing their journey to be filmed. So here’s the question … can they all stay committed to the cause? To the film? To each other? Is their committment as strong as their passion?
In The Un-Marrying Project writer Larry Kunofsky has taken a controversial matter and then turned it inside out. This is no easy topic and Kunofsky doesn’t gloss over any of it. With the overarching premise being that we’re watching two documentary film makers (Documentarians!) create a record for posterity, we gain access into nooks of participants lives in ways that perhaps they wouldn’t be so quick to divulge.
