Cottage Grove is a father-and-son story “with universal themes of family, truth, and forgiveness,” George Ellzey, Jr., said in a recent interview. Two ϳԹվ alumni—Jordan Shields ’98 and Sarah Donovan ’98, who met Ellzey through the ϳԹվ network in Chicago—have been important backers.
Much of the thirteen-minute film takes place in a grocery store parking lot on a sweltering summer evening in Chicago. It follows a youngish man (played by actor Patrick Agada), who picks up his estranged father (actor Sean Blake) from the hospital after he’s suffered a debilitating stroke. While the two wait for a health aide to buy groceries, they sit together awkwardly, sweating and tense.
Over the course of the film, the son, Emmanuel, experiences an arc of emotion as he confronts his weakened father, who can’t say more than a few words. Emmanuel moves through openness and yearning, to anger, disgust, grief, and finally, to a place of acceptance.
The short movie is loosely based on Ellzey's experience with his own estranged father in 2021. Though he had not spoken with the man for years, Ellzey picked him up from the hospital after he was treated for a massive stroke. They stopped at a Walgreens on Cottage Grove, a street in the South Side, where they sat together, listening to jazz, not speaking much because his father couldn’t.
Though it was just a brief, quiet episode, it had a volcanic effect on Ellzey. “When this meteor of a story happened, I was so inspired to write,” he said.
With support from his MFA film program at DePaul University and his family, Ellzey began writing the script in 2021. He assembled a cast, started to fundraise, and shot in August 2022. He completed post-production in 2023.
Since then, he’s screened the short at many film festivals, where it’s won several awards, including Best Editing & Best in Illinois at the Blue Whiskey Film Festival, and Best Short Film Writing, Audience Choice Award, and Voice & Vision Award at the Premiere Film Festival.
Last summer, at the Chicago XL Film Fest, Ellzey’s work caught the attention of a program director at AMC+, who selected it for the network's series highlighting rising stars in cinema. “It’s the biggest opportunity we’ve had so far,” Ellzey said. “Having the brand recognition of AMC is huge for an emerging filmmaker.”
Ellzey credits much of his success to the support of Shields and Donovan. Shields, a partner at Juniper Advisory, first connected with Ellzey after donated to Ellzey’s short film Division, which he learned about through a ϳԹվ-Chicago network. “Since 2017, Jordan has supported my career and become a friend,” Ellzey said.
Shields said he believes in Ellzey and his art because Ellzey “is a great storyteller, and very focused. When he takes on a project, he sees it all the way through to the end, which isn’t easy.”
The two men are both from Chicago. Ellzey grew up in the South Side; his grandmother lived on Cottage Street, right across from his high school. “I love showcasing my neighborhood, I love Chicago, I'm proud of being from the South Side,” he said
Part of his intention with Cottage Grove is to show the challenging aspects of living in the neighborhood as well as its beauty. “There’s so much rich culture, of style, of sound, of food, and so many other things that I wanted to peek at and highlight.”
After excelling in math and science in high school, George Ellzey arrived at ϳԹվ as a first-year student in 2009 thinking he would be premed. Since he had to fulfill an arts requirement, he decided to sign up for an introductory acting class. And that changed everything.
“ϳԹվ opening the horizons for me was pivotal,” he said. “If I hadn’t taken that acting class, I wouldn’t be a filmmaker now. Because of that class, I pivoted to English and theater and got exposed to dance.”
As the two characters wait in the car, they watch small family dramas play out around them. These reflect Ellzey's interest in exploring the interplay of exterior and interior scenes. “I wanted to show all the history between these two people in one location,” he said. “The world around them gives context and a subtext for their relationship.”
In the interactions between Emmanuel and Senior, they use words (very few on the part of Senior), but more than that, they use “no words or their bodies to shine a light on what’s unspoken,” Ellzey said.
While his relationship with his own father has improved since that evening in the Walgreens parking lot, and more significantly since he completed his film, it is still not what Ellzey dreamed it would be. “Making this short has allowed me to heal and release the weight of expectation I have put on my father,” he said.
He hopes that audiences also walk away with a sense of how acceptance can heal. “With Emmanuel and Senior in the film, they go through this process of opening their eyes to see who each other is and to accept each other—not for who they want, but for who they are,” he said.
“I want people to see each other," Ellzey continued. “Oftentimes, we let our perspectives, our pain, our agendas, our values, our convictions fog up or skew our viewpoint of someone else.”
He recounts an encounter he had with an audience member after premiering Cottage Grove at Tallgrass Film Festival in Wichita, Kansas. The older white man approached him after the film to tell him, as tears slipped down his face, how much he wished he could have reconnected with his own father. Others who have watched the film have shared similar desires with Ellzey.
“That is the beauty of and why we need art,” Ellzey reflected. “There is an element of entertaining, but there is an aspect of healing, of understanding, of sharing information and knowledge without judgment. That is the power of art.”
