Series/Themes: Featured, Special Guests, Spotlight Screenings, Virginia Filmmaking

Film Year: 2015

Locations: USA

Film Length: 96 min.

Director: Meg Ryan

Featuring: Alex Neustaedter, Meg Ryan, Sam Shepard, Hamish Linklater, Gabriel Basso, Jack Quaid, Lois Robbins, Tom Hanks

Fourteen-year-old Homer Macauley is determined to be the best and fastest bicycle telegraph messenger anyone has ever seen. With his older brother fighting in the war, the duty of caring for his widowed mother and siblings falls squarely on his shoulders. As the spring of 1942 turns to summer, Homer delivers messages of love, hope, pain, and death to the good people of his small town of Ithaca, California. One of those messages will change him forever. Based on Pulitzer Prize–winning author William Saroyan’s novel The Human Comedy, Meg Ryan’s directorial debut, shot in Virginia, is a touching coming-of-age story that paints a portrait of the exuberance of youth, abruptness of change, sweetness of life, sting of death, and the sheer goodness that lives in each and every person. Discussion with director Meg Ryan, producer Janet Brenner, and moderator Harry Chotiner

Supported by Bank of America