You & Me On a Sunny Day

A photographer and his elderly neighbor spent every Sunday for five years making a haunting “non-motion picture” about love, loss, and breakfast.

By Rocky McCorkle

Rocky McCorkle thinks movies should be an immersive physical experience, not a disconnected visual one. “It’s one of the first ideas I ever had: to make a movie. A movie that you walk through, large-scale, almost like a movie you experience in person,” he explains.

The story, inspired by the life of his own grandmother, is about an elderly woman who upon becoming a widow has vivid—almost hallucinatory—flashbacks of life with her husband. “There are times in the story as if he’s still there, she’s looking at him or talking to him,” McCorkle says of the main character, Millie, who was played by his downstairs neighbor, Gilda Todar. Todar became involved after McCorkle posted a flyer in the lobby looking for older models.“When Gilda came over, I knew she was the right one,” McCorkle says, “she was really sad when we were done, and she’s been wanting to do something else.”

But for McCorkle, good storytelling is all about the details in the setting and in the photograph. The stage was his own apartment, meticulously decorated the way he thought Millie would want it—even the…