What a year to be making a film about the United States Postal Service.
I’d like to say I planned this whole thing—directing a movie about a little known USPS program called Operation Santa in a year when they became the center of a political maelstrom. But I had no idea what 2020 would bring when we shot the film in the four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year.
Dear Santa centers on the USPS, an institution that seemed at points this year to hold our democracy in the balance. As 2020 got underway and we were in full throttle with post-production, we would read the headlines about the political machinations driving events at the USPS, with President Trump confessing to withholding federal aid for the USPS in order to sabotage mail-in voting, but our focus was on something more durable and timeless: the hundreds of thousands of letters that get sent directly to Santa each year and what the postal service does with them.
