Lydia Dean Pilcher To Mount Feature ‘Songs Of The Gorilla Nation’ Based On Dawn Prince-Hughes Memoir; Signs With Echo Lake Entertainment

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Award-winning filmmaker Lydia Dean Pilcher (Radium Girls, A Call to Spy) has signed with Echo Lake Entertainment for management—also announcing today that she has acquired the rights to Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, a bestselling memoir from Dawn Prince-Hughes that she plans to adapt into a feature, as both director and producer.In the true story, published by Random House in 2004, Dawn Prince is on the brink of survival as a homeless gay teenager from the wilderness of Montana, searching for connection on the streets of 1980s Seattle.

When she escapes to the zoo for the oxygen of nature, she unexpectedly makes a primal connection with the Silverback gorilla, Congo.Dawn gets a job at the zoo and begins a journey of self-discovery as she learns from Congo how to love, how to see herself in the gorillas, and ultimately in other human people.

This connection begins a lifelong quest as a deep creative thinker, a discovery at age 36 of being on a spectrum of autism, and an academic path to become a PhD in primatology and now an author of seven books.Pilcher adapted the screenplay for her third feature and will produce with Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning producer Audrey Rosenberg (Katrina Babies, I Am Not Your Negro).“When I read Dawn’s memoir, I entered my own mind through her exquisite visual language,” said Pilcher. “As I began to understand that every brain is like a fingerprint, it sparked a consciousness of my own differences in ways of seeing and thinking, and how far we have to go to understand and respect this difference in each other.”“I love Lydia’s vision and I’m proud to call her a friend after more than a year of exploration together in creating the screenplay,”