A deeply personal, richly entertaining account of one man’s search for true love...and giant sloths.

the story

Lyn Vaus (Lyn Vaus playing himself) sits on a small bench alongside Boston’s lovely Charles River, takes a slug of Jim Beam, a long drag from his Lucky Strike and casts his jaundiced eye upon the world:

I don’t want to be told I have to commit to anything. I don’t think anyone I know wants that dictated to them. I think everyone I know is looking for something to be committed to. But that word “commitment” - I keep seeing mental institutions. I mean, it is a big word. It’s got a lot of syllables. It has that hard kind of sound at the end of it, like a door slamming - “commit-MENT!”...

So begins the shaggy dog tale The Darien Gap, a deeply personal, richly entertaining account of one man’s search for true love...and giant sloths.

Lyn is broke, homeless, alone - eager to run away from his troubled past and start anew. His sole possession, a video camera, has become his salvation. Or so he thinks. With it he hopes to hitch down the Pan-American Highway to Argentina where he has learned there exists a rare creature, a legendary creature that is so reclusive, so exotic, so... slow, that it surely must have been created for him and him alone to find - the South American Giant Sloth. Lyn figures he can safely get some footage of this thing with his camera, sell it to some tabloid, make a little nest egg for himself...

When Lyn learns about the Darien Gap, a treacherous swamp in Panama that blocks the highway and thereby his escape route to paradise, he is unfazed. He’s gotten over bigger obstacles before, hasn’t he? He’s always been a survivor - just like his father. “When things get shitty, walk away,” his father used to say. And so he will. Just like his father before him. What could possibly stop him running now?

Enter Polly Joy (Sandi Carrol), a trendy fashion designer with a beautiful apartment on Beacon Hill. Lyn meets her at a party and manages to charm his way back to her apartment for the night. Lyn wakes up the next morning next to Polly Joy and for the first time in his life he has lost his chronic urge to walk out the door. So he stays.

Months later, deep in “relationship” mode, Lyn discovers that it’s possible he might be happy. He isn’t sure. Polly hasn’t mentioned the dreaded “commitment” word. That’s a good sign. He’s got a roof over his head. And Argentina does seem a long way away. Can it be possible he’s escaped the misery of his former life without ever actually having left?

No. Not possible. A letter from his dead beat dad, who he hasn’t seen or heard from in 19 years settles that. Like a giant lumbering sloth, slow but relentless, the past returns to haunt Lyn again. And with it, his itchy desire to run South. Only this time, the Darien Gap isn’t the only treacherous obstacle to be surmounted. There’s this relationship with Polly. How to get through that... intact.

“The Darien Gap was shot over the course of four weeks during the Spring and Summer of 1994. The film was shot on left-over 16mm film that we got cheap from the guys at NOVA at the PBS station WGBH where I used to work, so we think the movie could have some latent educational value. After weeks of painstaking rehearsals, we spent the shoot largely improvising and making it up as we went along. The biggest logistical obstacles we're finding parking spaces for crew and cast in Boston. While shooting on the streets, we got away with not having the necessary permits by claiming we we're doing second unit work for the studio film Blown Away. People believed us. SNAPPLE generously donated us 8 cases of Rasberry Lime Rickys. We still have 8 cases. How would I describe the movie? It humorously depicts the young, post-college scene in Boston, but it's not Slacker. It deals with the issue of divorce, but it's not Kramer vs Kramer. It intercuts actual video interviews between scenes, but it’s most assuredly NOT Reality Bites. It sometimes looks like an annoying Levis Blue jean commercial, but it endorses nothing, no product, no lifestyle, no hip trend. It's not about Darien, Connecticut; has nothing to do with THE GAP; has something to do with Giant Sloths; features hats only Dr. Suess could explain; is a road movie wrapped in a tragi-comic parody of twenty-something hipsters, reaches for emotional, if not spiritual epiphany....it's "OK"...”