COMPLAISANT

Year : Director : Tiffany Jaide Hightower Running Time : Genre : Drama

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COMPLAISANTCOMPLAISANT by Tiffany Jaide Hightower

About the Film

The feature film COMPLAISANT is a comparison of LEAH (seemingly happy housewife) and JENNIFER (female escort). This dramatic and beautifully painted story of their struggles, ironic similarities, and search for above all, love and happiness, takes place in New York City. Will either one of these women have the strength to evacuate their situations before losing all hope for a new way of life in which they are no longer forced to face abuse, the need to be obsequious to men or to be bound by the expectations of society?

Who is Tiffany Jaide Hightower

Tiffany Jade Hightower

A Writer, Director, Actress and Producer ( HighSi Films ), Tiffany grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. For sure it did not seem like the place for a young creative person to gain experience enough to make them ready for the big city but surprisingly it did for this young lady.

Tiffany has been acting for over fifteen years and wrote and directed her first production at age fifteen. While in Indiana she not only performed in community theatres but also at Indiana Repertory theatre at a young age. After training and performing with Asante Children’s Theatre, Pike Performing Prevention Troupe, Indiana Repertory theatre, Footlite Theatre Company, and doing many upon many plays and musicals and even films she decided off to New York she would go. Ms Hightower studied at American Musical and Dramatic Academy where she further trained in Acting, Theatre History, Shakespeare, Television and film and even Stage Combat.

Some of her regional stage credits include: Measure for Measure, Romeo and Juliet, Civil Wrongs, Macbeth, King John, Our Town, Zora Tales. While in school and working full time she still was featured in films: some of which were…Totems of the Fall, A Project Story, and Shooting Moments. After graduating from AMDA she decided to try her luck in Los Angeles. Within a couple months Tiffany had a recurring role on the soap opera GENERAL HOSPITAL. There came a point when she did miss the vibrancy of New York and decided to move back and at that point finished filming…The Record Deal.., P.O.E. and a few others which can be found at Blockbuster Online, Netflix, Hollywood Video etc.

Personal Message from Tiffany

…who I was by 2008

In 2008 I had a long relationship that ended and I felt lost in New York City but instead of falling in to depression I started writing. I had a revelation. Hey it happens. That revelation was “I really need to put my talents to good use and write about the strength of women”. What better way than to start my own production company! (HighSi Films) Within three months I had written and cast my project “Complaisant”.

I had a staged reading of the script in New York City at the Player’s Theatre in lower Manhattan. The problem is that I am a writer, producer, director, and actor that has a zero dollar budget to work with. It’s funny that I thought about paying for rehearsal spaces, crew, and sometimes didnt even have the money to pay my rent. My passion is what drives me and keeps me satisfied when I don’t have funds to buy dinner. The screenplay was an “official selection of the 2009 Beverly Hills Film Festival”.

…and who I am today.

I continued to edit and re-edit that piece while still writing other screenplays and coaching acting privately on the side but something was happening. My energy level started to change and though I was focused new pain that I was feeling made things a bit more challenging. Well in the fall of 2009 I was in a new and exciting relationship with a German native.

My first thought was “great I can spend time writing in a new Continent with someone that I love by my side” …and so I did. Still confused about the consistent migraines, numbness, and back pain… my life continued. Until I got a phone call from my home town of Indiana saying that my father’s health had taken a turn for the worse. He was my best friend and now there was a chance he was leaving me too. I called the airline to see if I could get a discount to visit him because at that point I didn’t have the money for the international flight. They said “no”, and he passed away that night. I had never felt so helpless in my life. In my heart I knew he wouldn’t want me to stop following my dreams so I didn’t but everything was getting more difficult. It felt like a piece of me had been lost when I lost him.

My walking started to be more difficult and started to look as though I was inebriated. Something was wrong but I didn’t know what, so I kept writing through the pain and by 2010 when I went back to Indianapolis, IN I was in the emergency room. They told me I had a sprained back, vertigo, and rheumatoid arthritis. In my heart I didn’t believe that diagnosis was correct, and it wasn’t. After days of testing it was clear… Multiple Sclerosis. Wow! I had been living with it for over 10 years and it was extremely active.

Thank God I had a doctor that put me on medicine that would allow me to continue to travel, write, and do anything else pertaining to the industry that I love as long as it didn’t make my health worse. I take one pill a day. Almost forgot how sick I was until in 2012 when I found out if one more lesion had developed I could’ve been paralyzed for the rest of my life. After being on the medicine for one year without a relapse, and submitting to more film festivals while still hoping and praying to eventually find an investor, my screenplay COMPLAISANT was selected for CALIFORNIA FILM AWARDS 2012. On my birthday January 25th 2013 and the year anniversary of the medicine that has thus far saved my life as I know it, I was flying to San Diego for the film festival! Now the next blessing I am hoping for is to find funding for COMPLAISANT one of the films I have written throughout my journey as an Artist, Filmmaker, and Multiple Sclerosis survivor.