Montine McLeod (Academy Award® nominee Melissa Leo) is a world-weary flight attendant who is one more warning away from being fired for her unfriendly countenance with passengers. Alienated from her own family—her mother is dying of Alzheimer's and her preacher brother is shunned from his small-town community for certain indiscretions—she is lonely and unhappy. Meanwhile, when 10-year-old Omar Hassan is awarded a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, his father seizes the opportunity to give his sweet and precocious son a better life than his—driving a taxi by night and working as a janitor by day. Under the custodianship of Montine, Omar is put on a flight to Los Angeles on the morning of September 11, 2001….

When news of the attacks break, Omar and Montine are grounded in Longview, Texas. After learning of the boy's direct connection to the tragic events, McLeod musters the compassion she could never afford her own family and embarks on an unsanctioned cross-country road trip to an uncertain future in New York City. Leo delivers a heartfelt performance alongside a strong cast directed by actor Travis Fine, who conceived of the story while working as a first officer pilot on a regional jet for American Airlines.

Travis Fine left a successful acting, writing, and directing career after being deeply affected by 9/11. He enrolled in flight school and forged a new path as a screenwriting airline pilot. The concept for The Space Between took shape while Travis was in the flight deck of a commercial airliner on autopilot at 36,000 feet.

Eight years ago, my daughter told me that we all have invisible wires that connect us to the people that we love… wires that cannot be broken by time, by space or even by death. As an airline pilot, I often thought about those wires as I flew passengers back and forth across the country. Hurtling along in a metal tube six miles above the Earth's surface at just below the speed of sound, a bunch of strangers had entrusted me with their lives. Did we have invisible wires that connected us as well?

And then, one night on a flight from St. Louis to Newark, I randomly asked my captain what it was like to be in the air on the morning of September 11. As he recounted his story and I reflected on my own memories of 9/11, I remembered that for a brief moment in time, the entire world was connected in a shared grief that knew no ethnic, religious or national boundaries. Drifting off to sleep that night, I saw the image in my mind of a young boy with scared eyes asking a flight attendant in an empty plane, "are we in Los Angeles?" As I flew another planeload of strangers from Newark back to St. Louis the next morning, I pulled out a piece of paper and began to scribble notes about two strangers in an airplane forced together by tragedy… and about the invisible wires that connect us all.