Our local film festival is a treasure for movie lovers, offering a slate of curated independent film, special events, and the chance to rub shoulders with filmmakers. Below, read about Cambria-based filmmaker brothers and their first feature film, and hear from a former child star about sustaining his decades-long career.
The Brothers Plummer
Once upon a time, there were two young kids from Cambria with a love of film. Many years later, those two kids are young men poised to screen their debut feature length film, The Strawberry, at this year’s San Luis Obispo International Film Festival (SLOIFF).
The Plummer brothers, Kyle, 29, and Carlos, 25, got their start in filmmaking thanks to our local film fest, and over the years as they’ve developed their technical skills, SLOIFF has nurtured their impressive artistic talents. They now run their own production company, SuperImage Ltd.
The box office is open!
The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival runs this year from Thursday, April 23, through Tuesday, April 28, in various locations. You can see the festival schedule, learn about special events and programing, and buy tickets at slofilmfest.org.
Highlights include:
• A screening of locally filmed The Strawberry on Monday, April 27, at the Palm Theatre at 5:45 p.m.
• A Q-and-A with Craft in Focus Award winner Haley Joel Osment on Saturday, April 25, at the SLO Masonic Lodge, from 5 to 6 p.m.
• The world premiere of How to Date Again, filmed in part at the Madonna Inn, will screen on April 25 at the Palm at 7:15 p.m., and April 26 at 10:45 a.m. and April 27 at 5 p.m. at Downtown Centre.
“I was part of the very first youth program that the SLO Film Fest put on in 2008,” Kyle explained. “That was right around the time that they were launching their Filmmakers of Tomorrow showcase. They were really trying to branch out towards educational opportunities, getting the local youth involved.”
That first youth seminar “kick-started” the Plummer brothers.
“We decided we were going to actually make a short film instead of just taking our camera in the backyard and messing around,” Kyle continued. “We were going to take it seriously and write something and actually do the whole rigmarole.”
It feels preordained that they would eventually evolve into full-fledged filmmakers.
“We live in one of the houses from [the 1990 film] Arachnophobia,” Carlos explained. “We moved in quite a bit later after the film was finished, but our dad was in the industry for a bit working mainly in TV, and our mom works as a corporate paralegal for a lot of people in entertainment in LA, so when they moved up, it was kind of like happenstance.”
Their parents had no idea the house was famous until they heard people talking and noticed passersby stopping to take photos.
“They were like, ‘Oh, wait a minute.’ They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, it was like in the movie.’ When they watched it, it was pretty prominent,” Carlos continued. “When the mortician eats the popcorn watching Wheel of Fortune, that’s our living room, our kitchen, all that. It’s pretty cool.”
The Strawberry was written by Cambria resident and clinical psychologist Steve Brody, who also wrote Hidden Creek (2025), another film shot in Cambria that played in last year’s festival. It also screened at the Los Angeles Film Awards, where it won Best Indie Feature, Best First-Time Director(s) of a Feature for Cambria residents Darien Jewel and Julian Mercado—who are producers on The Strawberry—and Best Actor for star John Henry Richardson.
For The Strawberry, they managed to land an even better-known lead actor, Mike Farrell, who had a long run as Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H from 1975 to 1983. Brody and Farrell already knew each other.
“We met, years ago,” explained Farrell during a recent phone call. “Our children were both at the same nursery school. It was an experimental school in that it was a nursery school staffed by men. These guys intentionally set out to be male prototypes for these kids. I was very impressed with the school experience, and Steve was as well.”
The pair collaborated on a project that never got made, but they kept in touch, so Brody reached out with The Strawberry script, which is about Herb Kaplan, an 80-year-old with late-stage cancer contemplating using physician-assisted suicide to end his life.
“I thought the subject was terrifically interesting, and I thought it would be kind of a challenge,” Farrell explained. “I thought it was really interesting to attack this subject from the point of view of the family. It makes you wonder how you would feel and what you would do under those circumstances. I know a lot of people today are faced with that and have to consider different possibilities. It’s really nicely written. It’s thoughtful. It’s caring. And the producers and directors seemed really dedicated to doing a project that was small, low budget, but doing it carefully and as sensitively as they could, so I thought, why not? Why not give it a shot?”
Farrell, of course, has been in the business for literally decades. His first foray into TV was in 1963. But even at 87 years old, he’s still willing to take chances and work with young filmmakers.
“I’d met none of [the crew] up until that time, and I thought, ‘Yes, they’re young, but what the hell? I’m not anymore. Why not give them an opportunity?’ I have to say that the cast and crew, everybody associated with it, got along.”
Years ago, Farrell had a dear friend in Oregon who chose to use medical assistance to end his life, so he has firsthand experience with it.
“He said he was going to do it, and he wanted me to know, and I said, ‘Do you want me to be there?’ And he said, ‘Yes, if you would.’ So I was, and what I have to say is, it was a very, very solemn and grounding experience. I have come to understand that it may not be for everybody, but it certainly was right for my friend, and therefore it’s right for whoever makes that choice.”
The Strawberry also features Doug Jones as Dr. Johnson. Jones is a favorite of Guillermo del Toro, having played creatures in Hellboy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and The Shape of Water (2017).
“There’s definitely been some interest in the film because of Doug Jones’ attachment,” Kyle noted. “He has a very brief role in the film, but it’s very significant, and it’s definitely part of his career move. Part of us getting Doug Jones was he wants more roles where you see his actual face instead of the monster makeup from his del Toro roles.”
The Plummer brothers are also very proud of the fact that they used an all-local crew. They’ve created a well-oiled machine that even impressed Farrell.
“Everybody knew we were tinkering with a subject that is dynamite on some levels, but a very subtle kind of dynamite—psychologically dynamite,” Farrell noted. “Let me just say, I went into it with high hopes, and I was never disappointed.”
The Plummer brothers are a perfect example of why SLOIFF is so vital to the arts in SLO County.
“We’re a little biased,” Carlos admitted. “We’re near and dear to it, and we live in the area, so it’s very special to us. We’ve been attending not only as filmmakers but as attendees, so having grown up with the festival, we’ve seen it grow, develop, change, and year after year, just continuously get better and better.”
SLOIFF Executive Director Skye McLennon said that it’s been exciting to see the brothers grow and continue to love the medium as much as they did in the Filmmakers of Tomorrow program.
“We have a very small filmmaking community here, and it’s been exciting to see the collaboration that happens and the way that people connect and make these things come to life. I’m just impressed by that,” she said.
“I just want to remind people that this is a world-class festival that you have here in SLO, and I think people that live here don’t always realize that,” McLennon added. “A lot of the filmmakers are coming, and they want to be here and talk to people, and what sets us apart and what I want to lean into is how we’re different than a lot of film festivals. We always get compared to Santa Barbara or these other bigger festivals and their glitz and glam, but that’s not SLO. We’re down earth, and I think we provide real audiences, and I think filmmakers appreciate that.”
And the award goes to …
At just 38-years-old, Haley Joel Osment is a Hollywood veteran with more than 100 acting credits to his name, and amazingly, it all started at a Burbank mall.
“My journey into [acting] was completely by chance,” he explained during a recent phone call. “It’s kind of funny to think of now. There was a table set up outside the Ikea in Burbank, where I went shopping with my mom one day, with two casting assistants who were taking Polaroids of kids for a Pizza Hut commercial, and they took my Polaroid, and my photo got picked off a pile later and I ended up doing this pizza commercial in 1992, which was then seen by the casting director for Forrest Gump and that led basically to everything beyond that. So, a pretty random series of events that led to everything that came after.”
Some of what “came later” included a role in the Nora Ephron-directed Steve Martin vehicle Mixed Nuts (1994). Osment became a household name after M. Night Shyamalan cast him opposite Bruce Willis in the blockbuster hit The Sixth Sense (1999).
He found himself at the center of a social movement when he starred in director Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward (2000), based on the book by Cambria author Catherine Ryan Hyde.
“That’s another thing that amazes me, and it makes me really happy that people still come up to me and talk about how the concept of paying it forward means so much to them,” Osment said. “It’s just a really powerful, simple idea. It’s one of those things that you’re glad takes hold with people because it’s led to a lot of really generous and profound things that people have done.”
Osment continued to cement his reputation as a bankable child actor when he starred in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), a Stanley Kubrick passion project that Kubrick started developing in the early ’70s before he turned it over to Spielberg in 1995.
“I learned things on that shoot that I think about all the time, and it was a really unique conceptual project to be involved in, not just because it was a Spielberg production, but because he had this relationship with Stanley Kubrick and the film had been developed in such a fascinating way over many years.”
‘I feel incredibly lucky to have had the experiences that I’ve had and to still be working, and most of all that it’s something I just love doing, whether it’s shooting something on a [sound] stage in LA or going out on location.’
—Haley Joel Osment, recipient of SLOIFF’s Craft in Focus Award
Osment has worked consistently his entire career, and now the SLO Film Fest is honoring him with its new Spotlight Presentation: Craft in Focus Award that celebrates his standout talent with an in-depth conversation exploring his creative journey on April 25.
Osment’s new film, How to Date Again, primarily shot in SLO County, will see its world premiere that same day at the Palm Theatre. It screens twice more during the festival at Downtown Centre.
The rom-com directed by Matt Flanders follows Michael (Rob Mor), a heartbroken animator, whose friends, Xander (Johnno Wilson) and Kai (Amanda Payton), push him to get back into the dating scene. It does not go well until he meets Leigh (Natasha Loring) and embarks on an incredible first date that takes them up the coast to San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay. Osment plays Hugh, an oddly intense desk clerk at the Madonna Inn.
“It was a very fun character to play, [and I] got the honor of getting to wear the official employees’ uniform of the Madonna Inn, which is a shirt I still have,” he laughed. “We all felt really fortunate that they were cool with us [filming] there because, particularly in my scene, we really show off the atmosphere in that big dining room. But, yeah, Hugh’s a quirky guy, and getting to play around with Rob in all those scenes, and then Johnno and Amanda, was really fun.”
The film is charming and has some twists you won’t see coming. It’s based in part on the real-life experiences of leading man Rob Mor, who shares writing credit with the director.
“I feel incredibly lucky to have had the experiences that I’ve had and to still be working, and most of all that it’s something I just love doing, whether it’s shooting something on a [sound] stage in LA or going out on location,” Osment continued. “This project was particularly cool, and one of the things that happens as you work longer and longer in this industry is certain relationships loop back around because I’ve known Natasha for a really long time. Rob and I actually went to NYU together at the same time, so I’ve known him for like 20 years now. And Johnno and I have been friends and played a lot of golf together the last couple years.”
Osment also managed to avoid what’s happened to many child stars: crash and burn. More importantly, he’s made a successful transition from child to adult roles.
“I really lucked out at having parents who were very cautious, even suspicious of all the Hollywood aspects of the job. As a kid, most of the films I did were done during the summer, so I could go to regular school. You wouldn’t have known that I was acting because everything else was so normal and all my friends were outside the industry. As I’ve gotten older, it can be a tough business, but it all comes down to me really loving the work on set and always feeling like I want to be able to try something new and play different characters. For that to be my main focus really helps me get through all the uncertainty and the ups and downs that can happen in the industry.”
Instead of worrying that audiences always see him as a child star, Osment thinks of his transition into adulthood as an opportunity to “disappear into characters more, to be showing up in a way that people might not always expect.
“I really like my job because you’re always learning, you’re always trying something new, and whatever has changed with technology and distribution, and the economics of everything, at the end of the day, it just comes down to me reading scripts.” ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in April 23-30, 2026.