MacKenzie Meehan in “Come Stay.” Photo courtesy of Victoria Haynes

Victoria Haynes’ short film “Come Stay,” which is having its world premiere at this year’s Maine International Film Festival, sees a former actress named Hannah (MacKenzie Meehan), who has settled in Maine, coping with a visit from her friend Cassie (Mary Cavett), a successful actress whose existence represents the life Hannah might have had.

Haynes herself is an actress, wife and mother whose first foray into writing and directing sprang from a similar crossroads, while the birth of “Come Stay” mirrors her story in more ways than one.

Where do I know Victoria Haynes from?

Born and raised in the Oxford County town of Waterford, Haynes left Maine to attend New York’s Tisch School of the Arts before embarking on her own successful journey into movies and TV. A friendship struck with late filmmaker Jonathan Demme while Haynes worked at a bookstore near Kezar Lake saw Haynes cast in Demme’s films “Rachael Getting Married” and “Ricki and the Flash,” and she went on to appear in TV shows like “Forever,” “CSI: NY” and Marvel’s “Iron Fist.”

Victoria Haynes on the set of her film “Come Stay,” which is premiering this week at the Maine International Film Festival. Photo by Annarosa Mudd

“Come Stay” was born of an unhappy – and unexpectedly extended – homecoming.

“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘trapped,’ ” Haynes said, laughing, “but it felt that way sometimes.” In March of 2020, Haynes’ father, former Press Herald writer Bill “Dood” Hayes, passed away. “We came up for the funeral thinking we’d stay a few weeks,” Haynes said. “Then because of COVID, it was another two weeks, and then the summer. I ended up moving into Dad’s house and sending my kids to public school in Maine. Honestly, it was a beautiful way to reconnect with the place I grew up.”

Haynes continued to do remote work as a film editor, a career she’d been pursuing for several years, when this pleasant (if enforced) Maine summer sparked the “Come Stay” tale of a former actress coming to terms with what might have been. “I didn’t know if my life in New York would have a future there,” she said. “I didn’t know if acting would be a thing any more, or editing. I found myself drawing on my experiences to put together this story, to see if I had any affinity for writing and directing.”

“Come Stay” is essentially a meeting between two possible versions of the director.

“Hannah is a former actress who’s happy in the broadest sense being a wife and mother, but who’s having a turbulent inner life wondering where the future is going and whether life as she once knew it was over. Cassie is a little bit more successful as an actress, but she’s getting divorced, and her visit sees them envying each other’s situation in a ‘grass is always greener’ sort of way.” Haynes points to the 1977 big-screen drama “The Turning Point” for comparison, where Shirley MacLaine’s retired ballerina faces a similar “what could have been” dilemma when her famous dancer friend Anne Bancroft comes to town.

MacKenzie Meehan in “Come Stay.” Photo courtesy of Victoria Haynes

Haynes truly embraced the Maine film community to make “Come Stay.”

While the film’s two main roles are played by a pair of New York-based acting colleagues (Haynes recounts how she and leading lady Meehan were constantly auditioning for the same roles), almost all the rest of the cast and crew are Maine movie mainstays. Cinematographer Jeff Griecci and assistant director Anna Gravel are familiar names to anyone interested in Maine-made movies, while actor Matthew Delamater (whose hunky local represents another kind of regret for the restless Hannah) is a face any Maine moviegoer will recognize.

“You can’t make a movie in Maine without seeing Matt,” said Haynes, who also thanks the actor for setting them up with the film’s important location of Norway’s Cafe Nomad. For a native Mainer who’s been away for a long while, Haynes also singles out a pivotal scene that almost didn’t happen but for the Maine know-how of AD Gravel.

If you don’t like the weather in Maine, pray for one perfect moment.

“There’s a river near my house called Mutiny Brook that was really important to my dad,” said Haynes. “It was my ideal place for a beautiful wide shot of the perfect Maine landscape, and I’d planned all these sun-dappled wide shots for the end of the film. Of course, it rained all through the shoot, and I was resigned to just not having it when Anna pulled me aside and said, ‘I need to talk to you. It looks like there might be a break in the rain in early afternoon.’ So we hustled and the sun broke, and we got that one gorgeous final shot of the movie. I felt like my dad would be happy to see that.”

Unlike her protagonist, Haynes envisions her career continuing in Maine.

“I really didn’t expect to find such a great group of professionals here in Maine,” said Haynes, who now lives in Brooklyn with her family. “It made me want to make the next one in Maine, which honestly I wouldn’t have predicted.” For Haynes, the enforced intimacy of “Come Stay’s” shoot was also surprisingly cozy – and emotional.

“I’d hoped to create a sort of summer camp atmosphere at the house,” Haynes explained, noting how she and her actresses stayed together at the film’s central location, her childhood home. “We stayed at the ‘girls’ house’ while the rest of the crew stayed at a house in Bethel,” said Haynes, nodding to mentor Demme’s habit of allowing actors to relax into a natural, lived-in rhythm on his sets. “It was my house, the film was written and conceived there, and having us all under one roof added a level of warmth and authenticity.”

Adding to that feeling was Haynes’ discovery of the unique qualities of a Maine movie shoot. “It’s hard to have that kind of community in New York,” she said. “There, ultimately everybody’s doing their own thing. Here, I found people collaborating, reading each others’ scripts, working on each others’ projects. They were all such wonderful people. They supported me, and welcomed me – I’m thrilled we got into MIFF, and we’ll get to share the film with the community that made it.”

“Come Stay” is screening at the Maine International Film Festival on Wednesday and Saturday with filmmaker Victoria Haynes in attendance.

Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.