Produced in California by French-Italian director Yan Nascimbene, The Mediterranean has shown at recent international film festivals, including Cannes and Chicago, to an enthusiastic critical response. Nascimbene sets the story of a marriage falling victim to interpersonal claustrophobia in the wide open spaces of a ranch in Hollister. The film's two protagonists, Paul (Conrad Selvig) and Joan (Joan Parazette), live at the ranch as caretakers, along with their daughter Sophie. Joan longs to revive the simplicity of their first months together in the Mediterranean, and at the same time wants more time to be alone and write--mostly about those first days. Paul, on the other hand, refuses to "recreate the past," but, in a desperate attempt to hold on to the present, begins a frenetic process of photographing and recording his wife and daughter's every move and sound. The film is shot in long takes and slow movements that suggest the painful element of time as it affects such a transition in such a relationship. Nascimbene, who studied painting and photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and then at U.C. Davis, mixes both media with cinematography in this unusual film that, as one Italian reviewer observed, "proceeds in a sober way...in its estranged editing and all-photographic sequences, never choos(ing) to scream but rather to whisper." Joan Parazette is Nascimbene's wife, and Noemie Nascimbene, who plays Sophie, is their daughter.