Filmmaker Karen Maine reveals the online success of her short film “Yes, God, Yes” prompted her to turn it into a fullfledged film.
“Yes, God, Yes” received 2.9 million views and also won Best Short at the St. Louis International Film Festival upon being premiered in 2017 as a Vimeo Staff Pick. It was after the success of the short that Maine along with producers Katie Cordeal and Colleen Hammond went ahead to make it into a full-length feature film.
Starring Natalia Dyer in the lead, the film is based on a Catholic teenager in the early ’00s who, after an innocent AOL chat that turns racy, discovers masturbation and struggles to suppress her urges in the face of eternal damnation.
Maine said: “I had written the short film for ‘Yes, God, Yes’ in 2014, and the plan had always been to get someone else to direct it because I didn’t have directing experience. A friend of mine suggested, ‘you should direct this yourself’, and I hadn’t really thought about it.”
The director added: “My producers and I made the short film as a pre-concept for the feature to prove that I could direct. It was never intended to be a short. It certainly got a lot of attention online when we released it. It’s funny, sometimes people in reviews are like, ‘this feels like this was a feature that was expanded from a short’, and the truth is that is completely false. The feature existed long, long before the short.”
“Yes, God, Yes” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.