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I NEARLY LOST YOU
WHY I WROTE THIS STORY
I grew up in a broken home where music was the only language that made sense. My family was musical, chaotic, passionate, barely holding together, and I watched my mother struggle with impossible choices between survival and connection. The question that haunted me wasn't "What if things had been different?" but rather "What would I want to tell my younger self, or a child I never had, about finding your way when the world keeps breaking you?"
I wrote “I Nearly Lost You” from that place of longing, for connection, for second chances, for a world where music still had the power to heal instead of being flattened into algorithmic content. I wanted to explore what it means to be a parent who fails, not because they don't care, but because they're drowning. And what it means to be a child who grows up with everything except the one thing that matters: being truly seen.
The 1990s grunge era wasn't just a backdrop for me, it was survival. That music saved my life. The raw honesty, the refusal to be packaged and sold, the understanding that beauty and pain aren't opposites but partners in the same dance. When I look at today's world, everyone staring at screens, young people reporting unprecedented loneliness despite being "connected" 24/7, I see the same pain I felt back then, just mediated through technology that promises connection and delivers isolation.
This story asks: What if you could go back and save yourself? What if the person who needed saving was your own child, but you were too young, too broken, to do it the first time? What would you sacrifice for that second chance?
I wrote “I Nearly Lost You” because authenticity demands it. This isn't a story about music, it's a story told through music, where every guitar riff carries emotional DNA, where time travel happens because a song reaches across decades and says "I remember you, I'm still here."
“I Nearly Lost You” lives in the contrast between two worlds:
1996: Analog, visceral, alive:
Film grain. Saturated colors. Bodies moving in real space to real music. The Electric Banana is a sweaty church where people come to feel something, anything, without mediation. Rachel's world is dangerous but present. When she looks at someone, she actually sees them. When she listens to music, it rearranges her molecules.
2026: Digital, sterile, disconnected:
Clean cinematography. Cool tones. Symmetrical framing that feels like a prison. Everyone alone together, performing intimacy for an audience of algorithms. Ann's world is safe but suffocating. The coffee bar is full of bodies but empty of connection. Even rebellion, cannabis, quitting your job, running away, feels anemic compared to 1996's raw desperation.
The visual language shifts when Rachel arrives in 2026. Her presence disrupts the clean lines. She brings chaos, mess, dirt, need. She makes people uncomfortable because she refuses to perform. The film's aesthetic question becomes: Can analog warmth penetrate digital cold? Can a mother from 1996 teach her daughter in 2026 that being alive means being messily, dangerously present?
Time travel as emotional truth:
The time portal isn't sci-fi spectacle, it's magical realism in service of emotional logic. Of course music can bend time. Of course a mother's love can break physics. The surreal sequences blend eras through overlapping audio, visual echoes, and the recurring haunting arpeggio that works like Proust's madeleine, memory made tangible.
Music as character:
The songs in this film are diegetic, played by characters, heard in spaces, triggering transformation. "Awefishyule" is Frock's rage given form. "Someday" is the moment Ann discovers she's her father's daughter. "Rachel" is a love song that functions as a sonic bridge across three decades. The score doesn't comment on the story; it IS the story.
WHY THIS STORY MATTERS NOW
We're living through a loneliness epidemic. Seventy-three percent of Gen-Z report feeling alone. Suicide rates are climbing. Young people are hyperconnected digitally but starving for authentic human contact. They've been sold a lie: that optimization equals happiness, that productivity equals worth, that documenting your life on social media equals living it.
“I Nearly Lost You” offers an alternative. It says: You are allowed to fail. You are allowed to be messy. You are allowed to need people. The path to healing isn't through perfection or self-optimization, it's through showing up for each other, imperfectly, repeatedly, across whatever distances separate us.
This isn't a didactic message film. It's a mother-daughter story about two women who discover that saving each other means accepting who they actually are, not who they wish they'd been. Rachel learns she can't undo the past. Ann learns she can't escape into the past. Together they learn that the present moment, this one, right here, is where love happens or it doesn't happen at all.
The 1990s setting isn't nostalgic wallpaper. It's a reminder that we once had a different relationship with music, with time, with each other. That we can choose presence over performance. That a world driven by authentic connection rather than algorithmic engagement is possible because it existed, and it could exist again.
WHAT I BRING TO THIS FILM
Musical authenticity: I'm a composer/guitarist with decades of experience. Every note of the diegetic songs is intentional. Every guitar part could be playable live on set.
Emotional honesty: I understand trauma, broken families, and the desperate search for belonging. This story doesn't sentimentalize pain or offer easy redemptions. It earns every moment of hope.
Collaborative spirit: I've worked in ensemble theater for years, where I learned how subtext can serve actors, and how to create scenes with vulnerability, chemistry, tension, conflict.
Craft discipline: I've studied screenwriting through Roadmap Writers (where this script received a rare "Recommend"), worked with a creative producer from “Severance” (AppleTV+) on development notes, and attracted interest from Oscar-winning producers. I understand structure, pacing, and how to tell a story that works on both emotional and intellectual levels.
Cultural timing: This film addresses digital isolation, mother-daughter trauma, and the search for authentic connection at exactly the moment audiences are hungry for it. Post-pandemic, post-algorithm-fatigue, people want to feel something real. This delivers.
MY PROMISE TO INVESTORS, CAST, AND AUDIENCES
This film:
- Honors the emotional truth of broken families without exploiting them
- Uses music as transformative magic, not nostalgic decoration
- Features two complex female leads who earn their reconciliation through painful, honest work
- Can look gorgeous on a modest budget because it prioritizes craft over scale
- Can play at SXSW, Sundance, or Tribeca and find its audience through festival buzz
- Delivers a message of hope without denying the darkness that makes hope necessary
This is my story to tell. I've lived it, I've earned it, and I'm ready to make it with collaborators who understand that the best films come from artists who have no choice but to tell this particular truth in this particular way.
“I Nearly Lost You” isn't just a title. It's a confession, a warning, and a promise: That we almost lost each other. That we might still. But that showing up, messy and scared and imperfect, might be enough to save us both.
Tom Demar
Writer/Composer
Los Angeles, January 2026
concept trailer
I NEARLY LOST YOU
A broke 1990s woman uses a time-traveling phone to save the daughter she gave up for adoption, but when she arrives in 2026, she discovers her grown child is now her same age, suicidal, and the only way to rescue her is to drag her back to the raw, dangerous aliveness of the '90s before the phone stops working forever.
RACHEL: Lead
Rachel lives in the 1990s. She had a traumatic childhood and lives by her street sense, taking nothing for granted. She works hard to stay on top of things. Music is her undoing.
ANN: Lead
Ann lives in the present, hobbled with loneliness, anxiety and existential dread. She grew up wealthy with precise professional life plan. She quit her corporate lawyer job to be a budtender.
​​​​​​​I NEARLY LOST YOU is an unusual love story with music overlay and magical realism, a fresh take on time travel.
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AUDIENCE
Young women and men (18-34), but also the chance to revisit the nostalgia of the 1990s will attract those who were young adults at that time (women and men 34-54+).
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I wrote this to explore my own past from a broken home, raised in a musical family, and with memories of a freer time and the passionate music of the 1990s. I asked myself, “Why am I always staring at these little electronic devices? If I'd had kids, what would I want to share with them now that they'd have grown?"
“73% of Gen-Z report feeling alone…It’s a strange paradox, Gen-Z are hyperconnected in the virtual world but socially disconnected…digital interactions have failed to replace the need to connect on an emotional level in the physical world.” -Forbes (7/28/23)​​​​​​​​​
"There is a melancholy and specificity that really sets this story apart from other time travel comedies/dramedies. It’s a time-travel with loads of heart. It has a 1990s nostalgic bent that feels like it has yet to be fully exhausted by most nostalgia movies. This script feels like a can't-miss." GRADE: “Recommend” (Roadmap Writers coverage)
Tom Demar is an L.A.-based writer, filmmaker, composer, actor from Pittsburgh and NYC. ​​
