Common Grounds Café
Project
Details
What started as a small bakery, messy, joyful, and constantly selling out, became something much bigger. This film follows the Friendship Bakery as it outgrows its space and becomes Common Grounds, ending with Eddie, a young man with special needs, stepping into his role as general manager.
Funny, chaotic and deeply human. It isn’t really about a café. It’s about belonging, purpose, and what happens when a community shows up.
Additional Info
The full story
A comedy about a bakery running out of room, made for a gala dinner, with a reveal nobody in the room saw coming.
Most gala films are earnest. This one had to be funny, which is a harder brief, because comedy either works in the room or it dies in front of the people who funded it. The bakery had outgrown its space so comprehensively that product was stacked on product every week, and that overflow is the joke the film is built on.
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About Eddie
Eddie Barbanell runs the Friendship Bakery at Chabad of Parkland, and has been acting since 2000. He played Billy in The Ringer (2005), where he met Johnny Knoxville, and later appeared with him in Jackass 3D. His other credits include Dumb and Dumber To, Addicted to Fresno, Loudermilk, and two seasons of Workaholics as Bradley “B-Rad”. IMDb · Wikipedia
The Friendship Bakery
The bakery behind the film is a social enterprise run by the Friendship Circle of North Broward and South Palm Beach. It makes challah, cakes and cookies, and it exists to give adults with special needs real jobs. Read about the bakery or follow them on Instagram.
