Conversation with writer/producer/actor Ashna Sharan & her acting team Wayne Jay & Roger Gutierrez on the making of the award-winning film REMINISCE.
As Monica gets ready to host her older husband’s college classmates, a phone call from her estranged sister puts her mind at unease. With the age gap and her questioning the one sacrifice she made for love, she feels like an outsider in her own home. As the evening continues, tensions run hot as truths come to light. After the friends leave, she questions the perfection of her marriage and the power imbalance as her loving husband struggles to rein her in.
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Get to know Ashna Sharan:
What motivated you to make this film?
The original idea was for a feature film drama so I wrote a short film version in order to be able to get funding / show investors what the feature film would be about. The film is loosely inspired by my own life. I’m married to someone ten years older in real life. My husband and I both got judgment for the age gap, but we ended up deciding to move forward anyways. Having realized that it affected some of my friendships and relationships with others, I can only imagine what a large age gap like 25 or 30 years would do so that’s why I exaggerated the age.
As for the professor-student relationship, my grandparents met in a student-tutor capacity so I tied that into the love story of Reminisce. Power imbalance and a generational gap amidst the #metoo movement added an interesting dynamic to the story.
From the idea to the finished product, how long did it take for you to make this film?
I had written it towards the end of 2023. We began casting in the spring and ended up doing a crowdfunding campaign over the summer. We shot it in October 2024 over two days in Los Angeles. Post-production was done by April 2025. So all in all, about a year and a half.
How would you describe your film in two words!?
Layered and Lovely
What was the biggest obstacle you faced in completing this film?
Casting for this was particularly tricky so Leslie Morris (the director) and I spent a lot of time with that. I was playing Monica and I had written the role of Brian for Wayne Jay. Since Diana and Patrick were Brian’s friends from college, we had to cast people who looked like they could have gone to college with Wayne, but also had the chemistry of long-time friends. We received a lot of submissions so we did self-tapes, virtual callbacks and then an in-person chemistry read. Elisa Nixon and Roger Gutierrez were cast and they did a tremendous job.
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