Vince Dixon, a 26-year-old filmmaker, tells stories that connect with people.
A Fishers native, Dixon plans to film “Sometimes I Imagine Your Funeral” — a short film vignette compilation based on his older sister, Lauren Dixon, and her battle with addiction — this spring in the Indianapolis and Hamilton County area.
In early 2021, Dixon wrote a letter to his sister that the film is now based on.
“I was never wanting to send it to her. That was never my intention — it was more just to get out my thoughts and my feelings,” he said.
Two weeks later, Lauren died of an overdose at age 26.
“I felt like I didn’t really have much of an outlet to get out these feelings of anger, grief,” he said. “I was grieving for her before she passed away. I was confused. I felt guilty. I didn’t know if there was something that I could be doing better. And so, I wrote this letter just for me, I guess more of like a journalistic, ‘What would I say to her if I could say anything to her?’”
The film centers on the relationship between a brother and sister, based on Dixon’s real-life experiences growing up. Three pairs of actors will play the siblings at different ages.
“The story kind of traces our relationship through the years,” Dixon said. “Basically, (it’s) me just trying to figure out who she is and what led to her overdose and figuring out how I want to remember her. A lot of these memories take place in Fishers and the house that we grew up in and different places where we have these strong memories.”
The theme focuses on how families want to help loved ones who battle addiction and how to support them through it.
“My hope through this film is to shed light on what it feels like to be adjacent to addiction, to capture on-screen all the complicated emotions you feel — anger, fear, guilt, grief — when your loved one is battling addictions, and to ask the question, ‘How do you remember your loved one when they’re gone?’” Dixon said.
Dixon plans to make the film as authentic and compassionate as possible and is collaborating with Fairbanks Recovery Center, the rehab facility his sister attended multiple times throughout the years.
“I hope that this film reaches audiences of people going through similar situations who are trying to figure out a way to help their loved ones,” said Dixon, adding that when his sister was going through addiction, he felt that information available on how to cope and help loved ones with the battle led to more confusion.
“A lot of those methods that I was using to cope or to try to deal with my sister were, in a way, enabling her,” he said.
Dixon’s decision to pursue a career in filmmaking began with a mass media class at Fishers High School. During his senior year in 2016, the school hosted a cancer gala. He and some classmates were asked to produce a short film that screened throughout the gala. The film incorporated his experience of his mom’s battle with cancer.
“This woman came up to me after one of the screenings and told me that her sister had cancer and that was the first piece of media that she had seen that portrayed how she felt,” he said.
Dixon immediately switched his planned college major from engineering to filmmaking.
Filming “Sometimes I Imagine Your Funeral” is scheduled for three to four days in late May in the Fishers, Noblesville, Carmel and Indianapolis areas. Dixon’s childhood home where he and his sister were raised will be an important filming location. The church they attended while growing up, St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Carmel, has granted filming permission.
“It just feels emotionally resonant to me to film this in Fishers and in the Indianapolis area,” Dixon said. “And it’s also a really cool way for me to bring back the experiences — (to take) everything I’ve learned in Los Angeles and bring it home.”
The project will include cast and crew from Los Angeles and the Indianapolis area. Former FHS classmate Gabe Donnelly will serve as associate producer. Dixon has had success sourcing potential crew through local filmmaker and social media groups, such as Indiana Filmmakers Network, and is casting the project through Backstage.com.
The estimated $20,000 budget is being crowdsourced through Seed and Spark, an online fundraising campaign platform. For more, visit seedandspark.com/fund/sometimes-i-imagine-your-funeral.
From Fishers to LA
Filmmaker Vince Dixon graduated from the University of Southern California in 2020 and is a former production associate for Nickelodeon Animation, where he worked on projects such as the CG animated “Transformer” series “Transformers: Earthspark.”
Dixon is an associate producer for Paramount Plus in the creative marketing department. He aspires to be a writer-director and wants to land a job as a writer in a television show writer’s room. H
Dixon resides in Los Angeles and writes television pilots and feature films in his spare time.
