Winning The Grand Prix at Hiroshima International Film Festival

A Million Eyes, a short film from director Richard Raymond, has added to its many accolades with its Grand Prix Award win at this years Hiroshima International Film Festival. This is Richard’s second win at the festival with his first being last year for Souls of Totality.

The story of A Million Eyes follows a young boy played by Elijah M. Cooper who sets out to capture something he loves with the help of his mentor (Joe Morton) despite grappling with his mother’s alcoholism. In an interview with Script Mag, Raymond goes into depth about his personal connection with the story written by Chris Zacharias Jr.

A Million Eyes reminded me of my childhood in a very specific way and then in the making of the film I realized that every artist can connect to this type of story because whether you’re a writer, a painter, a poet, a singer, a director, we have all had that first scary moment where we saw things a bit differently and we wanted to express ourselves and we didn’t quite know how, and it’s a very fragile time, and someone came into our lives that saw we had an interest in something in the arts and supported us… that mentor figure.

Raymond is currently developing a new project titled One Thousand Paper Cranes that’s set to star Evan Rachel Wood, Rafe Spall, Jim Sturgess, and many incredible Japanese actors. The film follows the true story of Sadako Sasaki, a 2 year old survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and her story surrounding the myth of a thousand paper cranes leading to the novel by Eleanor Coerr. Raymond describes as “the synthesis of these two women who would never meet but who would unwittingly work together to create the symbol of peace in the paper crane.”