Libby Ewing returns to Athens, bringing Tribeca with her

A week before OHIO’s Homecoming Weekend, a Chaddock + Morrow College of Fine Arts graduate had a homecoming of her own. 

Libby Ewing, who graduated from OHIO with a BFA in Acting in 2006, returned to the Athena Cinema for an exclusive showing of her first directorial feature, “Charliebird.” “Charliebird” debuted at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival, where it received the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature and a Best Performance award.  

Following the showing of her film, which follows a music therapist working in a children’s hospital who befriends a teenage patient with a persistent kidney disease, Ewing participated in a Q&A with audience members, moderated by Ewing’s former professor Shelley Delaney.  

“To think about where I was when I was an undergrad studying with you, Shelley, and I was just like working at Bagel Street being like, ‘How do you even get an apartment,’ ‘I have to go to New York, how do I get a job’… I'm not sure I can quite put it into words other than this is very, very special for me,” Ewing said in response to a question about what it means to show this film in Athens. 

Shortly after graduating from OHIO, Ewing made a permanent home in New York City where she worked to make a name for herself in the acting scene. She worked in commercials before starting a theater with several of her fellow Bobcats in New York. After that, she made her way to Los Angeles, where her connection to OHIO remained an important part of her career. 

“A lot of film grads went to LA, so I was welcomed with open arms there, continuing to work more in television and feature films acting-wise, and then I started creating things and writing with another alumni, Katherine Skelton,” Ewing said. 

Skelton was in her first year of college when she met Ewing, who was a senior teaching assistant at the time. Ewing and Skelton would go on to work together on a number of projects, all of which shaped Ewing into the filmmaker who made “Charliebird.” 

“Skelton and I reconnected in LA, started writing, making our own work and then started filming things,” Ewing said. “I made a movie with three other people, and that's really how I cut my teeth in film.” 

“Charliebird” was filmed over the course of 14 days, a demanding timeline but a necessary one for an indie feature on a slim budget. The film’s emotionally charged plot, and the inspiration she found for it, kept Ewing going. According to Ewing, the film was written by Samantha Smart, who stars as Al, the main character; her and Ewing had been “incubating” the script in a women’s writers collective when Ewing’s father died. 

“I was at the point where I was like, ok, this is really hard, and I'm making stuff off my own dime, and I think maybe I might choose a different profession,” Ewing said. “But we were working on the script, and I just had so much grief and so much, so many feelings around this, and I didn’t know where to put it other than in the work. And so, I called up Sam and I was like, ‘We just have to make this,’…It was truly a labor of love.” 

From there, the pair scraped money together through fundraising and calling in almost every personal favor they were each owed, Ewing said. Together, Ewing and Smart held line readings in New York, dove into the profession of music therapy and scanned their hometowns for filming locations, all leading up to the final cut that would be shown at one of the largest film festivals in the country.  

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“Charliebird’s” stunning debut at Tribeca opened several doors for Ewing; she is now working on several projects, including Italian crime thrillers and Appalachian cult dramas. The success of the film has also shown Ewing the other side of the film industry, finding new challenges in distribution deals and talent agencies.  

Despite being shown a novel side of the film industry, Ewing was still able to incorporate the skills and philosophies she learned in OHIO’s theater program into her film work. Ewing applied what she learned to be in front of an audience to her directing with non-actors and creating visual representations of heavy emotions. 

“I leaned on my acting background, like ‘How does trauma live with me? How does it, sit in my mind?’” Ewing said. “Sometimes it comes in flashes and is nonlinear, and so I just was able to, with the limits of storytelling, not lean on the acting to emulate an experience that feels truthful to me with others on the screen.” 

Even with a myriad of paths opened up to her, Ewing hasn’t forgotten where she came from. Through writing (self-described) bad projects in Bushwick with her friends from theater to finding a new community with film program graduates in LA to her odyssey to Tribeca, OHIO has been with Ewing as her career has spanned coasts, continents and mediums. 

“Being here in this community, it's wild, it's full circle,” Ewing said at the end of the Q&A, teary-eyed and enthusiastic. “Thank you all so much for coming.”