DETAILED SYNOPSIS OF FILM

BREAKING UPWARDS

'Breaking Upwards' follows a young New York couple who, after four years together, have grown stifled. Desperate to escape their ennui, but fearful of life apart, they decide to intricately strategize their own break up. Daryl and Zoe create a maze of rules and boundaries, hoping they can avoid the pain of separation by slowly weaning themselves off of each other. Setting days on which they can speak and days on which they can't, the two twenty-something’s are forced to confront their already embedded fears of self-government. Their experiment becomes an exploration of independence within the confines of a relationship--monogamous or polyamorous.

Driven by a quest for answers, both native New Yorkers turn to their parents for all things related. Zoe, a child of divorce, investigates her parents’ failed partnership to gain insight into her own, while Daryl moves back in to an intact, but flawed childhood home. Zoe's mother Helaine (Andrea Martin), a single pot-smoking Brooklyn sculptor, promotes feminist self-empowerment. Daryl's mother Joanie (Julie White), a Southern Belle turned Jewish ball breaker, sees marriage as the only option for happiness. Daryl's father Alan (Peter Friedman), an introverted Upper West Side dentist, quietly watches the dissolution of Joanie and Daryl's once tight relationship. Each respective parent projects their perceptions of commitment and its subsequent failures or successes onto both Daryl and Zoe, ultimately leading to a tangled web of compromise, confusion, and betrayal.

Once the experiment allows for other lovers, our two protagonists are thrown into tumult as they forge new understandings of intimacy, be it lovely or humiliating. While Daryl finds temptation (Olivia Thirlby) at a synagogue meet-and-greet, Zoe's co-star in an Off-Broadway play (Pablo Schreiber) deceptively woos her solely to deepen his performance as an actor. The gender divide is revealed, and questions ensue: what does it mean to be a single woman in New York, and what does it mean to be a single man?

While Joanie at first suggests marriage, her brewing anxiety about Daryl's lack of a career propels her to ultimately interrogate his commitment to a faltering romance. However, her concern turns vicious when Daryl passes up a job opportunity in Vancouver to stay with Zoe. The drama finally erupts at the Wein's annual Passover Seder.

'Breaking Upwards' explores a world in which young people are hyper-articulate, while professionally sidetracked; foul-mouthed while emotionally vulnerable; intellectually curious while self-aggrandizing. This is a world in which parents ask the same questions as children, and children force parents to explore notions of loneliness much later in life. It is a world where all people need the same thing and don’t quite know how to find it.

The film blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction by casting real life couple (and filmmakers) Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones as themselves. An uncensored look at young love, lust, and the pangs of codependency, 'Breaking Upwards' follows its characters as they navigate each others' emotions across the city they love. It begs the question: is it ever possible to grow apart together?