Teen director makes her debut with 'My Guardian Angel'

Lots of people of all ages dream about going back to their old school. The rock group Steely Dan even made a hit song vowing never to do such a thing. But there’s no denying that classroom and playground memories are powerful, whether you want to revisit them or not.

Teen film director Nya Chambless returned to her old elementary school, Bay Haven School of Basics Plus, to shoot scenes for her feature film, “My Guardian Angel,” which premiered April 12 at the Sarasota Film Festival.

“My Guardian Angel” tells the story of Nya’s childhood friendship with Teeja, who was her best friend in Pre-K and died of cancer on New Year’s Day in 2015.

Nya, now a student at Booker High School, was moved to make a short feature film about Teeja not just as a tribute to her friend but to raise awareness about pediatric cancer and the scourge of bullying.

Nya was a new student at her Pre-K and just 5 years old when she met Teeja, who was a year older. “We both bonded because we had lamb jackets and we would roll around in the mulch so we would look like real lambs,” Nya recalled in a video interview. “We became really close.”

At the time, Nya’s fashion style consisted of layering clothes, wearing lots of colorful bracelets and switching up her hairdos with different looks like “two buns or waterfall ponytails.” Teeja couldn’t join in the tonsorial fun because she had lost her hair due to her cancer therapy. But she wore colorful scarves to hide her baldness.

Not all of the school’s other students were able to overlook Teeja’s condition the way that Nya did. First Teeja and then later Nya were subjected to name-calling and bullying. Other girls warned Nya not to play with Teeja because she had “cooties.”

“The bullying got to the point where they would push her,” Nya says. “My entire rainbow butterfly view of the world got bursted like a balloon.”

Despite the fact that Nya was taunted by other kids, she maintained her relationship with Teeja. She was the only one of Teeja’s school friends to be invited to her house for a play date. But not long after that, Teeja stopped attending school and was hospitalized.

Nya wanted to go see her friend in the hospital during the last days of her life, but wasn’t able to. “Teeja told her parents that she wanted Nya to remember her how she was when she last saw her,” said Nya’s father, Jerry Chambless.

During a panel discussion after “My Guardian Angel” was screened to a full house at Ringling College Morganroth Auditorium during the Sarasota Film Festival, Nya said she doesn’t remember clearly what happened after Teeja died.

She does recall Teeja’s parents cut off contact with her for a year because she was a painful reminder of their daughter’s death. They ultimately moved to Georgia and had two more children. Teeja’s family gave their consent to Nya’s film, but she is trying to protect their privacy by changing the names of the characters.

Although Teeja’s family moved away, Nya never forgot her friend. Her desire to make a feature film based on their friendship gained momentum during COVID. During the pandemic lockdown, memories came flooding back to Nya. She and her father, who is a film producer and adjunct film faculty member at Ringling College of Art and Design, had lots of time to brainstorm.

She know where she’s going

“Oh, another nepo baby!” might be the thought bubble above some readers’ heads once they learn about Nya’s father’s film expertise and connections. But the cynical souls who dismiss Nya’s achievement of writing and directing a 25-minute short feature film at the age of 15 haven’t met her.

Did she get help from her father, who gave her “notes” (showbiz talk for recommendations) as she went through 25 drafts to finally reach a shooting script of 18 pages? Most certainly. But the creativity and drive behind “My Guardian Angel” springs from Nya herself.

Chambless also helped his daughter put together a team who helped her cast, shoot and edit her film and add original music. He also helped assemble a team of professionals and find the equipment to finish the film during the technical process called “postproduction.”

As his credit on “My Guardian Angel” notes, Chambless served as producer for the film. That job calls for doing anything and everything to help get a movie made, particularly attaching talent to a project and raising money.

Image courtesy of Beck Bolletti

Even though her friendship with Teeja had taken place in Pre-K, Nya decided to set the film in elementary school and use older children because they could remember dialogue and take direction more easily.

In the playground scenes in “My Guardian Angel,” Chambless served as what might be called “child wrangler” by keeping the many extras in the scenes under control. ”That was part of my job as first AD (assistant director),” he says.

Everyone knows how rambunctious children can be when they’re playing on slides and swings. Chambless had to coach the extras on how not to disrupt the action between the key players. That freed up Nya to embrace the role of director.

As the daughter of a film producer, Nya had made films before “My Guardian Angel,” but this is her first full-scale production with a crew and a cinematographer, Natasha Thornton.

Nya found the actors for her film by placing ads in industry publications such as Backstage Magazine and Actors Access. Many of her actors are local. Some will be recognizable to Sarasota arts patrons, like adults Katherine Michelle Tanner of Tree Fort Productions and Jeffery Kin of Sarasota Rising. But others came from out of town.

One thing that surprised Nya was how people applied for roles that they didn’t seem well-suited for. “We got a 60-year-old man who wanted to be one of the moms. Casting is so strange,” she said during the panel discussion, rolling her eyes, shrugging her shoulders and reminding you in that “as if!” way made famous by Alicia Silverstone in “Clueless” that she is indeed a teenager.

Nya cast Daria Droteva as Kirina, a stand-in for herself, and Katie Makovec as Aurora, the film version of Teeja. There are two other female characters who interact with the friends. One is Maura, the mean girl played by Brindisi Capri, and the other is her reluctant follower, kind-hearted Paige, played by Eva Wisniewski.

All of the child actors are experienced, but Makovec is particularly convincing as Aurora. Her character grabs the simple joys of life while she still can and trys to stay positive despite the hostility of her peers. Aurora’s bald look was achieved with a cap and makeup applied by special effects experts from Ringling College.

It takes a village

Production on "My Guardian Angel" took place over the long Thanksgiving weekend of 2024. The shooting schedule was going to be short to begin with, it was speeded up when an incoming storm threatened to rain out the playground scenes at Bay Haven School.

Despite the compressed schedule, the shoot was a success, Nya said. “Production was great. We had crew ranging from professionals to college students to seniors at my high school that I had never met,” she said. “It turned out to be a great working environment. We had all different ages on the set and the older ones mentored the younger ones.”

The one problem? “The kids didn’t want to be bullies at first. They know it’s wrong,” Nya said.

In the film business, people who help raise money or gain exposure for a film often receive executive producer credits. On “My Guardian Angel,” they include business consultant and Disney veteran Adam Armbruster, Sarasota Film Festival Chairman and President Mark Famiglio and Elizabeth Coplan, a playwright who heads up a nonprofit called Grief Dialogues.

Coplan helped Nya make a “pitch deck” (finance lingo) to make PowerPoint presentations to potential donors and community foundations to get backing for her project.

Nya also used her on-screen talents to raise money for “My Guardian Angel.” Those who attended last year’s Sarasota Film Festival may remember her trailer that screened before films unspooling during the fest.

For an anti-bullying film with a social message like “My Guardian Angel,” fundraising doesn’t stop once the film is “in the can.” The next push is to acquire funds to screen the film in schools and children’s hospitals around the country, all the while boosting awareness of pediatric cancer.

The opening titles for “My Guardian Angel” include a reminder that in December $194 million was cut from government funding for pediatric cancer research.

Joining Nya in her efforts to spread the word about the need for continued research and acceptance of young cancer patients is an affiliate of Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, where Teeja died.

No spoilers here, but “My Guardian Angel” includes a plot twist that makes it clear that Nya Chambless is just getting started on her creative, socially conscious journey. No doubt her family, friends and Sarasota’s generous philanthropists will be there to land a hand when she embarks on her next project. Who can say "no" to that smile?