SHORT FILM, BIG DREAMS: PETALUMA FILMMAKER HOPES 7-MINUTE FANTASY LEADS TO LARGER PROJECTS

© 2007- The Press Democrat

BYLINE:    JOHN BECK

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT PAGE: D13

The familiar words above Sylvia Binsfeld's front door say it all: ``Seize the Day.''

[This is the woman] who mortgaged her Petaluma riverside abode to finance part of her $110,000 short film, "Dorme,'' premiering this week at both the San Francisco Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

The same smooth-talker who charmed multi-platinum-selling Brazilian singer Arnoldo Antunes into letting her use his song "Dorme'' -- which not only inspired the film, but runs the length of it -- for free.

Maybe this "Carpe Diem'' thing has legs.

"Every little bit helps,'' Binsfeld says, in between scenes of her film, which she's managed to figure out how to screen on her son's video game console.

If it's hard to imagine spending over $100,000 on a seven-minute short film, know this: The star-lit dream fantasia was originally shot on Super 35mm film and then enhanced with 100 digital effects in post-production. She worked closely with special effects guru Steve Wright, whose credits include "Spy Kids 3D,'' "Ray,'' "Ali'' and "Batman and Robin.''

"There's something warm about film that's harder to get with digital,'' she says.

There's no dialogue in the film, just the soothing Portuguese lyrics of Antunes' lullaby and surreal images of a young boy falling into dreamland and tripping through the galaxies, floating in a toy boat, visiting his grandmother's house, blowing magic dust on the Sandman -- before making it safely back into bed.

"I was thinking, why don't more people do fantasy films? I see so few of them out there, are they not popular? It's because there's so much work, you've got to build the set and make the costumes -- everything has to be fantasy. As soon as it looks real life, it's no longer fun.''

Her bedroom ceiling is still painted with the stars you see in the film. In the corner of her living room, a small wooden boat is a reminder of a lush water sequence shot on Oakland's Lake Temescal. An actor who has dabbled in indie films for more than a decade (the Tarantino fling took place in the 1995 short ``Dance Me to the End of Love'' inspired by the Leonard Cohen song), Binsfeld makes a cameo as a motherly ``Lady of the Lake'' character who befriends the boy and morphs into a fish (the most impressive effects sequence in the film) to guide him to land.

Symbolism is layered throughout. At one point, the boy lays down his sword and white doves take flight. The mother archetype appears in many forms -- the moon, water, the ``maiden, mother, crone'' triumvirate and even Mother Goose.

The film is already being used as part of poet Terry Ehret's Santa Rosa Junior College class "Dreams and Inward Journeys.'' Sandwiched between Stephen King's "The Symbolic Language of Dreams'' and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan,'' "Dorme'' is used to explore ``how the unconscious reveals itself in our conscious life.''

" A commercial filmmaker who creates ads for clients as diverse as autobody shops and lingerie boutiques, Binsfeld plans to use ``Dorme'' to gather career momentum, possibly even spinning it into a children's book.

"It's my calling card to get a feature film and some nice commercial work,'' she says. ``It was my shot  to [prove what I can do], one time, and after that I'd better have funding.''