The Stonecutter

The Stonecutter is a present day drama about a man reclaiming his strength and creativity after years of denial and self-destructive anger. Ray Rucci, age 29, was once a gifted stonecutter who apprenticed with one of the masters, his father. At age 17, Ray found out about a dark family secret and his world fell apart. He ran away, in part to protect his sister by keeping this secret from her, and from a revered father now reviled. At war abroad in the Special Forces, then the years adrift, the trouble with the law - Ray remains a heart-hardened man at war with himself. The film opens as he intervenes a street fight, taking a man's life. That same evening he presents a necklace he's hand crafted to the woman who's trying to get him to open his heart and he gets a long-distance phone call from a step-mother he didn't know he had: his father is dying. Ray returns home to keep a promise that he'd made years before: that he'd cut his father's gravestone.