Abigail Bruley, a Philadelphia-based filmmaker, took years of rest and rehabilitation therapy before she was able to reintegrate into the world following her traumatic brain injury.
When she finally returned, Bruley found herself overwhelmed with emotions that needed to be processed.
Having previously created the comedy web series “Down the Show,” she wanted to capture her complex feelings — grief for her former self, rage over her losses, confusion regarding her current state, and hope for the future.
To do this, she began making surreal film shorts around Philadelphia that starred a fictional version of herself.
“When your brain changes after a traumatic brain injury, you kind of become a foreign exchange student in your own body,” Bruley explained.
These films, she described, acted as “postcards” sent back to herself to capture the atmosphere of her evolving reality.
The recent screening of the “Main” trilogy, named after its lead character, took place in the Maas Building in Ludlow.
The trilogy’s first chapter, “Main Blessings,” showcases the main character holing up in the apartment of her friend Lars, who has taken an unexpected turn towards entering the priesthood.
In this installment, a clergyman, played by New Jersey rocker Ted Leo, expresses his disinterest in Lars’s life choices.
Following that, “Main Absolves” shifts the narrative to the suburbs, where a seemingly normal family gathering spirals into chaos, particularly with the intrusion of a bizarre neighbor.
The final film, “Main Remains,” sees the protagonist trapped in the afterlife while her loved ones grapple with fulfilling her bizarre last wishes.
Notably, Marisa Dabice, lead guitarist and vocalist for the Philly band Mannequin Pussy, plays the lead character’s best friend, while the music features contributions from the legendary Philly jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra, with permission from the Sun Ra estate.
Bruley began developing the trilogy in 2018, roughly five years after the car accident in Costa Rica that left her with a traumatic brain injury.
When she returned to Philadelphia, she was placed into a medically induced coma, and upon awakening, she underwent extensive occupational and vision therapy alongside vestibular rehabilitation aimed at restoring her sense of balance.
“It was a lot of learning things all over again from scratch,” Bruley recalled.
This included relearning conversational flow and understanding idioms, a challenging feat for someone reinterpreting the nuances of everyday language.
Bruley noted, “On the dot, no strings attached. These things that are embedded into our everyday vernacular that when you’re just relearning vernacular, you’re like, what does that mean?”
Reflecting her altered perception of reality, Bruley’s films do not follow a conventional timeline and embrace the absurd.
Throughout the series, Main inadvertently witnesses the odd antics of her neighbor, shares a joint rolled with torn Bible pages with a priest, and takes a taxi ride through purgatory.
These surreal segments illustrate the spiritual quest present within the series, a journey informed by Bruley’s personal search for meaning following her injury.
As she expressed, “When reality stops making sense, you start looking to what else is out there. … I learned a lot about just how to be in the world through different frameworks.”
While Bruley sees “Main Remains” as a conclusion to a chapter of her life, she is not ready to part ways with these characters entirely.
She anticipates the possibility of adapting them for a feature film or a pilot in the future.
In the meantime, she plans to enter her latest film into festivals, following the success of earlier chapters, notably with “Main Absolves,” which secured an award at the Los Angeles Film Awards in 2022.
Through her filmmaking, Bruley aims to bring visibility to what she considers an “invisible disability.”
She remarked, “I think people understand disability optically. They understand when someone’s in a wheelchair on a ramp or they’re blind and need a cane.
With a neurological disability, there’s nothing really to show that you need a little extra help. So it really exists beneath the surface and it kind of shapes how you move through the world, even though it’s all between my, myself and I.”
image source from：https://www.phillyvoice.com/traumatic-brain-injury-film-abigail-bruley-ted-leo/
