An emotional journey for filmmaking couple

When Victoria Paige Meyerink and Lawrence David Foldes accepted two awards at the Rhode Island International Film Festival earlier this month, it wasn't the filmmaking couple's first visit to Rhode Island.

In 1999, Meyerink underwent treatment for a brain tumor at Rhode Island Hospital. It was the beginning of an emotional journey that took the pair to Maine, twice, and brought them full circle back to Providence. In the six years between, she and Foldes made Finding Home, a film about a young woman who inherits a Maine inn after her grandmother's death.

Foldes and Meyerink, married 22 years, have long careers in the entertainment industry -- she as a child star in an Elvis movie and Danny Kaye's weekly variety show; he as the director of a teenage beach movie at age 18.

Their involvement, which was both romantic and professional from the start, began in 1979, when they met at an awards program in Los Angeles. Together, they made movies in several genres -- horror, action, comedy. But by 1998, "something seemed to be missing for us," Foldes remembers. "Both of us felt somehow creatively unfulfilled."

Then came Meyerink's 1998 diagnosis with acoustic neuroma, a type of brain tumor that, while benign and slow growing, threatens hearing loss and facial paralysis if not treated.

Dissuaded by the fact that surgery, too, carried the risk of hearing loss and nerve damage, Meyerink sought a new form of treatment that combined two types of radiation therapy. She went through 15 doctors before finding one who agreed to try it. That doctor was Georg Noren, of Rhode Island Hospital's New England Gamma Knife Center.

The successful treatment - which Noren has since used on 40 other patients -- ended a yearlong ordeal during which the couple dropped everything to research treatment options and consult doctors. Emotionally exhausted, they headed to Rockport, Maine. They would be teaching at the International Film & Television Workshops. The location offered natural beauty and a chance to relax.

That's where a student, Grafton Harper, approached them with the script for Finding Home. The meaty story appealed to the couple's desire to make a movie that meant something. Foldes, who later reworked the screenplay with a co-writer, remembers thinking: "Instead of selling popcorn and baby-sitting people for a couple of hours, couldn't we use the power that we have to affect people's lives in a positive way?"

With a budget of less than $5 million, Finding Home was made on the cheap even by art film standards. (Blockbuster-type movies generally cost more than $100 million to make.) Yet the deeply emotional story managed to attract notable actors. The cast includes one Academy Award winner -- Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) -- and three nominees: Genevieve Bujold (Anne of the Thousand Days), Justin Henry (Kramer vs. Kramer) and Jason Miller (The Exorcist).

Filming took place on Maine's Deer Isle between Labor Day and Christmas. As winter set in, the film's art department painted shrubbery and grass green. They chipped, torched and scraped ice off the beach, or covered it with sand, rocks and seaweed. Actors wore 1940s summer attire while snow lurked just outside the frame, and sucked on ice cubes so their breath wouldn't appear when they spoke.

That's as high-tech as the special effects got. Finding Home has an old-fashioned feel; it was shot on 35mm film, with broad, sweeping views of New England's fall color, and a 100-piece orchestra. Foldes wanted to evoke David Lean, who directed Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

Meyerink and Foldes, now 44 and 45, respectively, invested their life savings in making the film. Meyerink served as the film's producer; Foldes was the director. Once it was finished, they poured their time into promoting it, entering it in film festivals in New Zealand, South America, the Middle East, Europe and Asia, as well as all over the United States.

Finding Home has racked up awards -- more than 20 in all -- on the festival circuit. In Providence, it won the best editing award and tied for best feature film.

Critical reviews of the film have been mixed, but that doesn't bother the filmmakers. Critics "love edgy films," said Meyerink, who still has the wide blue eyes and round face of a child star. "This is not an edgy film. This is a big, beautiful film."

The couple is turning now to theaters, traveling to many openings to conduct question-and-answer sessions. The promotion strategy also includes inviting pastors and ministers from nearby churches to view the film, and asking them to promote it to their congregations if they agree with the values it espouses, which include family, forgiveness, reconciliation, sexual responsibility and wise life choices.

The movie has been showing on Cape Cod, and opens in Seekonk today. It opens in Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Little Rock next month, and in Los Angeles and New York in October.

Foldes and Meyerink, who are donating 10 percent of the money they make on the film to the Gamma Knife Center, think their yearlong medical saga gives the film a depth that resonates with audiences.

"We both matured as filmmakers and human beings," said Foldes, an energetic man with intense eyes. "It's because of that that the film is what it is. We were emotionally changed by having gone through that."

Foldes and Meyerink will hold a question-and-answer session following tonight's 6:45 screening of Finding Home at the Showcase Seekonk Cinemas 1-10.