In the short film drama Indigo Blue, written and directed by Albert Pritchard, low-income parents (played by Jayme Lawson and Charles Brice) struggle to secure affordable healthcare for their sick daughter. Faced with few options to acquire the money they need, the father risks everything to get the proper treatment for his child.
The short debuted at the 2025 Santa Barbara International Film Festival and was also handpicked and advised by Sean Baker as part of the 2024 Neon x Kodak grant. Here, Pritchard talks to Deadline about the inspiration behind the timely short film.
DEADLINE: What was the inspiration behind this short film?
ALBERT PRITCHARD: It was almost a decade ago now. I met a family in Orange County whose baby was born with half a heart. So, they needed a fundraising video, and I was connected with them. Part of their story about why they needed a fundraising video was that they had a very important surgery that their child needed. They were getting ready to fly to a hospital in Chicago, I believe. As they were getting ready to fly, they received a call from their insurance company stating that they’d been denied after being preauthorized after fighting through months and months of hurdles and then with the denial that surgery would’ve cost close to a million dollars. They were willing to put their careers on the line to be able to live a life of fundraising to make sure their son could be able to get that healthcare. That really opened my eyes to the issues surrounding the healthcare crisis and what many families have to deal with.
Fast-forward then to about 2019, I came across a story of a man in Philadelphia who essentially robbed the pharmacy, but he didn’t use any weapons. He passed a note to the clerk that said, Give me all the money. I’m sorry. I have a sick child. You have 15 seconds.” The clerk opened the register and stuffed his bag with cash before the man fled on foot. He was never caught. Months prior to this robbery that same summer, a man with a handgun entered a smoke shop and said he needed to pay for his daughter’s kidney transplant. Both stories have lingered with me for years. That stirred the question: What would cause someone to risk their life and prison to put themselves in such a situation? What circumstances and predicaments would push a person to see this as their best option to desperately secure a loved one’s medical needs? Were these people monsters and criminals, or simply humans who found themselves caught inside a complex situation?
DEADLINE: Did you keep in touch with the family after all that?
PRITCHARD: Yeah. They’re such a beautiful family, and just their hearts are so incredible, and it was an amazing experience working with them. But yes, I have kept up with them over the last decade. In the short film, there were images of their child when he was born. When we were in edit, I was looking at the film, wishing that we could have something that just brings [the story] to the forefront of what the themes are and what we’re exploring. So, I reached out and shared what we were trying to do with this film, and they gave me the blessing to be able to use those images. It’s been interesting to see as people have watched it and hearing how those moments when they see the baby really hit them. I think it’s just reality combined with the viewer watching this and feeling that empathy and wanting that support to come to the child [in the film].
Going back to the family, though, that child is alive and thriving, but it has been a journey for the family for sure.
DEADLINE: Talk about the film aesthetic. I noticed the blue tint, but it also looks like it wasn’t filmed on digital.
PRITCHARD: We were the recipients of the NEON Grant in partnership with Kodak and Sean Baker. This project was hand-selected by Sean Baker as part of a cohort of 10 other films that explored the theme of love. So, it was actually my first short film that I’ve shot on 16 millimeter. That experience was so special to be able to just add another layer of humanity and another breaking through the artifice of just creating textural imagery that just hopefully brings the spirit and life of what we’re dealing with, with real humans navigating troubles and hardships and really the depths of where they’ll go and the sacrifice for their love, parents’ love for their child.
As for the blue tint, we were very intentional about making sure that blue was a dominant color that fed through the entire project and runtime of Indigo Blue. There’s even a sequence during the climax of it where the color very, very subtly shifts bluer and bluer. So, by the end of that, and at the peak of how the narrative flows, we’re in the bluest moment of the world. But for me, Indigo Blue, it’s about love. What we wanted to do with blue is have all these different shades and what that represents in our lives and the stories that come into this color and this palette, and this film is dealing with love and sacrifice. So, we really wanted to be able to extrapolate the interiority of what love looks like in all the different forms of palettes through this color of blue and position that into the film.
It’s also one reason why we shot in New York and why it takes place during the winter. It’s a cooler moment of the year, and the way the city’s architecture blends with the winter feel just gives us such a strong, vibrant blue that translates these feelings of sadness and love.
DEADLINE: How did you find Jayme Lawson and Charles Brice as your leads for the film?
PRITCHARD: I was familiar with Jayme Lawson’s work in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which was another Neon film, and The Batman. We filmed in January, so we also knew about Sinners coming out. But I just sat and watched a lot of her interviews and felt she was such an intrinsic, thoughtful performer, essentially. Considering the material of Indigo Blue and the character she plays, I knew I needed someone who could convey emotion in silent moments. Ultimately, Indigo Blue is really about characters trying to grasp and hold onto each other in a world that has lost empathy. And she was so empathetic in her portrayal; we are thankful to have had Jayme.
I had a friend who introduced me to Charles Brice around the same time, and we connected and really just felt like he was so poignant, and his character doesn’t have a lot of lines in the short film. So, I knew I needed someone who could communicate through their eyes and convey empathy that the audience could feel. When I met Charles, I was like, “This is our character. This is our person that needs to run to be able to carry the story alongside Jayme and the dynamic of what these parents are wrestling with essentially.” And then our casting director [Violette Trotter]is friends with Lily McInerny, and we got her cast 24 hours before we were filming. I had seen her in this Sundance movie that came out a few years ago called Palm Trees and Power Lines, so I had always wanted to work with her. Casting worked out so beautifully.
DEADLINE: You have a speech from JFK running throughout the background of the short. Why is that?
PRITCHARD: That is from a speech that JFK gave in Madison Square Garden about healthcare and pushing for healthcare reform. I found that so interesting because you’re looking at something that’s more than half a century old involving an American president who is trying to fight for healthcare reform. Fast forward to 2025, and we’re still dealing with the same fights, arguments, and social healthcare warfare. What I’m exploring as a texture and palette in Indigo Blue is the past and present, with the aim of creating a conversation that looks toward the future. And I thought it would be very powerful to have this piece of his speech running through the entire film.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about the last shot and the ending. What does it mean to you?
PRITCHARD: So, the film essentially is bookended with this recurring nightmare that he is having. And so, where we landed at the end, there is no resolution because families that are dealing with injustices with the healthcare system and the way that is designed, it is an ever-ending fight and really a nightmare that they’re cyclically stuck in. So, the way that we cut it and the way the film ends, you could stitch it to the very beginning where he’s having the nightmare in bed at the top, and the film works itself into a loop.
But it’s the idea that we have this character in this world, New York City, which is as American as it gets, as a representation of the blending and melting pot that’s our country. And he is looking at that one individual who means the most to him, to the point where he would literally put his life on the line to save, which is his daughter. And that is just the morality of what that means to be willing to go to prison or sacrifice your own life to be able to save your child because you care and love them that much. And so, you’re seeing this where we’re steeping ourselves in this final image of the nightmare while you’re hearing JFK during his speech from half a century ago talking about this issue of health care.
DEADLINE: What would you like people to take away from your short?
PRITCHARD: I really feel our world has lost empathy and the ability to cradle that and to express it. And so ultimately, the story has always been about understanding, one, the resilience of what families have to go through regarding where we’re at currently in the conversations with healthcare. But more so than that, I wanted to tell the story in a non-judgmental frame. It’s really an intimate portrait of this couple that are trying to just do the best that they can with the means and resources and abilities that they know to be able to protect and give their daughter a healthy, thriving life, or that’s at least their goal and their hope, as most parents do have.
Going back to that story that I had come across from the Philly man in 2019 who had robbed the pharmacy, it’s very easy to make judgments over just wild decisions that people have to make and the predicaments that they’re in. But I didn’t want to tell a story that had just very didactic morality. I wanted to allow the audience to sit into the gray and to be challenged by how far we can stretch the empathy to understand, “OK, this is why these parents are making this decision, and this is why the husband, Charles Brice’s character, is doing this.” And it’s not as easy as, are these people monsters or are they humans?
DEADLINE: Are there plans to make this into a feature?
PRITCHARD: We’re so thankful for the reception that we’ve gotten with Indigo Blue and seeing how it’s resonated emotionally with the people. I’ve had conversations since the beginning with my producer Kelly Peck, who’s the executive producer of The Brutalist, and our other team, that we would want to adapt this into a feature film because we really believe that the story is so relevant and there’s an urgency of millions of Americans that are dealing with these things in these situations and that are caught in these circumstances. And there’s a million stories that we can tell with this. So, right now, we are deep in the threads and weeds of translating this into another larger format story.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Pritchard is repped at UTA by Hope Watson and Ugonna Obioha. Michael Peay and Jason Diamond also produced.
The post ‘Indigo Blue’ Writer-Director Albert Pritchard On Tackling Familial Desperation Within The Healthcare Crisis In Sean Baker-Backed Short Film appeared first on Deadline.
