“3 14” is about two strangers discussing life, death and the mistakes made in-between.
Is there redemption - always, for any of us? Or sometimes, are some mistakes too
big for anyone to ever live down?
Tamela Bergin has just been released from prison after serving 5 years for manslaughter.
Who did she kill? A known abuser - of her and others. But the violence of her actions
looked more like murder than self-defense to a jury. Injustice? Tam thinks so. She
angrily defends her actions that night to anyone who speaks of them. But in her
private moments the truth of what happened eats at her. She defends herself to everyone
but herself, instead resorting to more and increasingly severe self-punishment.
And one day it's too much.
Tam is trapped in her parents' house - her childhood home - with the lasting memories
and presence of her father, an abuser himself, feeling no more free than when she
was behind bars. She has traded one cell for another, trapped in the truth of her
own life. And there's only one way out. She thinks.
Until the phone rings.
She's never spoken to the man before - this voice on the other end of the phone
- but he knows who she is, confronting her with questions and assumptions about
her life, her crime and her sentence. And now her supposed freedom.
Neither is behind bars and neither is free, partly of their own doing, but also
thanks to how society perceives them and their crimes. Stigmas threaten permanence.
Their situations feel endless and without escape, represented by their daily phone
calls at 3:14pm, which play off the mathematical constant Pi, 3.14.