Sperryville
‘Daily Bread’ is in the oven
Nina May — the name might conjure images of a coy, eyelash-batting Southern belle draped in a sweeping hoop dress, descending slowly down a circular staircase with Rhett Butler beside her.
The real life Nina May (it’s pronounced “ny-na”) bears little resemblance. While she is a beautiful, highly intelligent woman, Nina is also a force of nature, and any attempts at capturing her essence present challenges to even the most gifted of wordsmiths. A true Renaissance woman, she in fact created the Renaissance Foundation, a non-profit, educational organization that developed Renaissance Women Productions to provide learning opportunities to people who feel called into the entertainment industry but need vehicles to showcase their talents and skills.
“The idea is to jump start careers and discover new talent by producing entertaining and educational products that give many people the opportunity to be either in front of, or behind the camera on a real production,” she has said.
Her latest project is a film series entitled “Daily Bread” (dailybreadseries.com), currently in production and to be shot entirely in Rappahannock County.
The series, she says, is based on the same model she used for “Life Fine Tuned,” a feature-length movie also shot in Rappahannock (primarily), and which garnered national and international awards. The film provided an incubator for newly discovered talent, launched careers and featured numerous local residents. “Life Fine Tuned” was presented to wide acclaim in last year’s Film Festival at Little Washington.
“Daily Bread” she says, ”is a faith-based, postapocalyptic drama starring eight millennial women stranded on a farm after a solar flare hits the earth, and they decide to rebuild civilization without losing their humanity, and all they have are cookbooks and guns. They decide to thrive and survive. The theme stresses that if you aren’t grounded in the truth and in absolutes you will become like the animals.” She adds that she is working on this production with Forge Studios of Washington.
Nina and her husband Colby, an accomplished attorney, are God-fearing people. While they and their son Parke enjoy well-earned material successes, they also celebrate a generosity of spirit, are kind, philanthropic and savor life’s simple pleasures.
Colby likes nothing more than to quietly chew his tobacco while casting for fish off their pond pier. Nina is often seen in jeans and boots, driving all-terrain vehicles, her mastery of tractors and her beloved Bobcat known to many. Their home is frequented by family and friends, formal and informal dinners, all preceded by humble prayers. All manner of folks, from Hollywood glitterati to local farmers, truck drivers, stone masons, carpenters and others, find themselves part of the May family. It is this lifestyle, love of people and the foundation of their faith that inspire Nina’s work. Her movies and documentaries reflect this faith, and often contain the symbolism of the phoenix rising, the mythical bird with fiery plumage, from whose ashes a fledgling phoenix rises, renewed and reborn.
As casting for the series is currently in gear, she writes, “We are inviting anyone interested, to either read for a role, or become part of the crew, to contact us through the dailybreadseries.com site. You can access the ‘cast’ and ‘crew’ pages and let us know how you would like to get involved in this fun, educational project that will result in family friendly, faith-based entertainment.”