The Apocalypse of the 'Adulte' Virus

If you can imagine the basic premise of Lord of the Flies expanded to a worldwide, futuristic level, then you have a sense of Pursuing Nostalgia, a 30-minute short film premiering Sunday, November 14th in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Made by young brothers Alex and Elisha Watrous, it presents a world where all post-puberty residents have been mysteriously wiped out by a plague that began in the winter of 2010, leaving only, circa 2023, a bunch of now older, orphaned survivors.

The principals of Freezy Taste Soo Good Productions are presently a third-year student at Boston's Wentworth Institute of Technolgy (Elisha) and a senior at Mount Hope High School in Bristol (Alex). One of the beauties of their story premise is that it required only teenage actors, facilitating both the hiring and directing of performers.

A planet deforested of adults

While the pair are new to filmmaking, they realize that you need more than a simple post-apocalyptic world premise to keep audiences hooked. So the focal narrative point of main characters Brian, Logan and Noah quickly becomes a mysterious small box containing some sort of nostalgic link to the pre-"Adulte" virus decimated world.

Pursuing Nostalgia is screening a the Kellaway Center, a downtown redevelopment with some notable history of its own. It was once the site of the William Haskell Manufacturing Company, which started out as a small shop in 1820 and grew into the oldest continually operating bolt & cold-punched nut plant in the United States.

[Watch the trailer for Pursuing Nostalgia here]