Nine-year-old Ruby Rabil wondered why her mom was not the parent taking her to school one recent morning in Armonk. That is one of those things her stay-at-home mom, Tamara Rabil, has always done.
Tamara told her daughter she had an early interview with a reporter who was writing about her movie ”“ their movie. There have not been many yet, but interviews come with her new career. It”™s a career and a business born of a mother”™s public unburdening of a private fear and harrowing memory.
A native Virginian, Tamara moved to New York after college to pursue a career in the fashion industry. She already was a licensed insurance agent, having worked for her parents in the insurance business they owned in Richmond. In Manhattan she spent about 15 years at fashion”™s epicenter, working as an executive at Ralph Lauren”™s and Donna Karan”™s design companies and at Guess Jeans.
Along the way she met Al Rabil, a successful real estate banker and investor in off-campus student housing properties who co-founded and is managing partner of Kayne Anderson Real Estate Partners.
“I fell in love,” Tamara tells us over coffee in the office of her new production company, Wild Angel Films, in an Armonk business park. Her husband”™s real estate office is one floor above at 200 Business Park Drive and when the phone rings in Suite 204, it”™s often Al calling, Tamara says amusedly. Three kids later, it”™s still a tight marriage.
“He”™s a scratch golfer,” she says. “I was not about to be a golf widow. Golf widow is not in my program.” So she took up golf, a sport in which, to her professionally appraising eye, women were handicapped by wretched fashions.
So Tamara about 10 years ago started a women”™s golf apparel company, TEGNA ”“ Total Emphasis on Golf”™s Necessary Apparel, that is. Her clothing line was sold in private country club shops and retail stores.
She gave up her business to be a stay-at-home mom. “The fashion industry isn”™t flexible enough if you want to be with your kids and still work,” she says. But having grown up in a family that shared both business and home life, “I didn”™t realize how hard it would be to give up working.”
About three years ago, “I was at one of those turning points where I wasn”™t fulfilled at home intellectually and creatively.” A brochure she”™d received from the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville proved serendipitous. She decided to enroll in a class at the center”™s Media Arts Lab. It was the first of 17 classes the 41-year-old mom has taken there.
“I didn”™t know a lot about film,” she says. “For me it was like change, like the deep end of the pool. That made it more exciting.”
In a class taught by a documentary filmmaker, students were asked to list what they were most afraid of as a potential writing topic. “I wrote, Being an unfit mother,” Tamara recalls.
For a class assignment, she took home a video camera to tell a story about that which she most feared. She went to a park and duct-taped the camera to a ladder and sat down in front of it. She told a story that would become the basis for “Unburden,” an emotionally laden, 19-minute movie that will be shown May 19 at Jacob Burns as the first in the center”™s Spotlight Production series of student films.
Its original working title was “The Unfit Mother.” It is, says Tamara, the story of a young mother learning “what it”™s like to bring a child into this world and six weeks later, almost takes her out.”
Ruby, the Rabils”™ firstborn, was six weeks old when her mother bumped her carrying seat against a door jamb in their Armonk home. The baby fell headfirst onto a hardwood floor. She was breathing but she did not cry, and her parents rushed her to a hospital emergency room.
The infant had a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain. Doctors examined her for other injuries that might have been inflicted by abusive parents. Tamara feared Ruby would be taken from their home by Social Services. “I was a wreck,” she recalls.
Her parents drove through the night from Virginia to the Greenwich hospital. Tamara”™s mother, Martha Rogers, to whom the film is dedicated, lifted Ruby and handed her for breastfeeding to a fearfully reluctant Tamara.
“I didn”™t want to pick Ruby up because I was afraid I was going to do more harm than good,” Tamara recalls. Her own mother “showed me what it takes to be a mom, the perseverance that it takes.”
“Honey, she needs you,” says Martha”™s character in the film. Tamara calls her the hero of this family story.
Working on the raw, 16-miunte “confession” she told to a video camera, Tamara spent six months with a professional scriptwriter “learning and crafting how to tell a story for film. ”¦ Finally we got a version we were proud enough” to put into production in partnership with the Jacob Burns center.
Financed by the Rabils, it is the first professionally produced film by a Jacob Burns student, Tamara says. A 26-person crew largely composed of film center staff shot it over four days last July at three Westchester locations ”“ the Rabils”™ home in Armonk, Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco and Chappaqua Hand Car Wash, where a rainy night driving scene was filmed after business hours.
Tamara found her work as executive producer on the film “just like running a small business. I did everything; they (the crew) did everything too.”
Its production cost?
“A small car,” Tamara answers discreetly.
“Unburdened” has won two awards in the six film festivals in which Tamara at Wild Angel Films has entered it. She shows us a glass trophy from the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa Bay, where the Westchester production won the grand jury prize for a narrative short film. It has also been screened for sociology classes at SUNY Purchase.
“I never thought that I would actually give it to the world at these festivals,” she says.
The founder of Wild Angel Films plans to present more films with parenting themes to the world through her production and distribution company. Two projects, based on other mothers”™ stories, including a feature-length film, already are in the works. In 10 years, she tells us, she aims to make the Wild Angel website “a library for parenting films.”
Seeing an audience of 600 at one festival screening, “I knew then that this could be ongoing. We may make money at some point. While we”™re waiting to make money, I can do good for other people” on what Tamara calls their parenting journey.
“This is fulfilling to me. It has all the elements that I need,” including the “adult interaction” she had missed in those earlier years at home
“What a great way to spend the next 20 or 30 years of my life,” says Ruby”™s mom.
Dear John,
Thank you for this touching and positive article. I know I have made my family proud. Enjoy your weekend.
Tamara