‘While You Were Gone’: The Untold Story of Candida Royalle

When we interviewed Candida Royalle recently, she spoke about a personal documentary film that she’s recently begun work on.

It’s called ‘While You Were Gone’ and it promises to be affecting, revealing, funny, important and complex. Just like Candida herself.

This week, a Kickstarter campaign was launched for ‘While You Were Gone’ and The Rialto Report is excited to have the opportunity to be able to contribute to this documentary project. Please join us in helping to bring this story to the big screen.

(With thanks to Danniel Nicoletta for use of the lead photo above).

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‘While You Were Gone’

Candice was only 18 months old when her mother left home, leaving a scar in the heart of a girl and the woman she would become. Through her unorthodox childhood in New York City and her early training in performance arts, through her starring roles as Candida Royalle in adult films and her pioneering work as a producer of erotic films, through her design collaborations and her writing, through her public speaking and her battle with ovarian cancer… the question was always there. Why did you leave me?

That question is at the heart of a new documentary project about the life of Candida Royalle, a woman who refused to be defined by the labels we use to understand a complex past. A woman facing an unknown future, setting out in search of the mother she never knew.

In collaboration with award-winning Canadian filmmaker Sheona McDonald, Candice will take us back through the events that gave shape to her life. With an eye to answering the one question that’s stalked her throughout and a desire to understand if that’s the only question. Candice will not only peel back the layers of her own life, she will look for the mother she never knew.

This week marks the launch of a six-week campaign to bring to the screen ‘While You Were Gone: The Untold Story of Candida Royalle‘, the intimate story of a life lived full-throttle, with vision and irreverence… and a whole lot of fight.

In exploring universal themes of love and loss, rejection and ambition, shame and empowerment, Sheona and Candice will look at how the choices we make – and the challenges we face – touch the lives around us, drive us to achieve things we never dreamed possible, and shape the people that we become.

The crowd-funding campaign for ‘While You Were Gone’ has now launched on Kickstarter.com and runs through to August 10th, 2014. Please visit it and donate here.

Here is the trailer:

Here’s what Candida said to us about ‘While You Were Gone’:

“My Kickstarter campaign for ‘While You Were Gone’ went live this week. It’s a project close to my heart that I’ve dreamed about doing for a long time: an autobiographical documentary about my life, my work, and especially, about the search for my mother who left when I was 18 months old.

It’s the story I haven’t shared in all the many interviews and documentaries I’ve been in, the one I’ve held back until the time was right, and I could tell it in my own words.

Below is the link to the beautiful trailer created by Sheona McDonald, a sensitive and talented award-winning filmmaker who is producing and directing this biopic, ‘While You Were Gone: the Untold Story of Candida Royalle’.

Please have a look and help me raise the money. $5, $10, $20… even $1 can help! These campaigns are built on many small donations. (Though we certainly won’t turn down big ones!)

Please consider donating. If everyone donated even just a few dollars it would get us there.

And please help me spread the word. It all helps. I have until August 10th to raise the money”.