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TIFF Interview: Sofia Bohdanowicz on grief and magical thinking in Point and Line to Plane

Sofia Bohdanowicz’s short Point and Line to Plane is her most personal film to date, a meditation on grief that marks a formal shift for the director. Keep up to date with our TIFF ’20 coverage.

A still from Point and Line to Plane and an image of director Sofia Bohdanowicz
TIFF Interview: Sofia Bohdanowicz on grief and ‘magical thinking’ in Point and Line to Plane.

In Sofia Bohdanowicz’s newest film, Point and Line to Plane, the screen fills with details from the paintings of artist and medium Hilma af Klint. The shapes are geometric; the lines organic but drawn from sources beyond ordinary perception. In voiceover, Deragh Campbell, as Audrey — a fictional stand-in for both the actress and director Sofia Bohdanowicz — recalls memories of her friend, Jack: a freckle, his soft hands, and the way he’d nod his head. Jack has recently died. In these abstract forms and movements, we are lulled into a state of mourning. The power of emotion renders space malleable, and Audrey seems to cross borders and time in a haze.

The title of Sofia Bohdanowicz’s latest film, Point and Line to Plane, is taken from a book by another artist, Wassily Kandinsky. The film starts at the Guggenheim in New York and travels to Vienna and St. Petersburg — all punctuated by Kandinsky’s thoughts and paintings. Like Hilma af Klint, his work sought to capture the unseen world of sound. His abstractions are non-objective only in the sense that they don’t portray what we can see with the naked eye. The enormity of this invisible world and the immense power it holds over us hangs over Bohdanowicz’s film. In the mists of grief, coincidences and the unexplained guide Audrey and the narrative down unexpected pathways. 

Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint were contemporaries, though Hilma’s work was long-buried. For many, their first introduction to her work was through Olivier Assayas’s film, Personal Shopper, a film that Bohdanowicz cites as an influence. Assayas’s ghost movie is similarly about the relationships between technology and grief, as well as coincidence and spiritualism. In a way, all of Bohdanowicz’s films treat her artistic influences as part of the reality of her characters’ experience. More than just bookends or references, art is woven into the very fabric of the film’s existence, as potent as a memory or an encounter. 

With Point and Line to Plane, Bohdanowicz uses a fictionalized character to explore facets of her own life and world. Her previous collaboration with Deragh Campbell — Never Eat Alone (2016), Veslemøy’s Song (2018), and MS Slavic 7 (2019) — inquired into family histories and research projects. The work becomes a hybrid of their shared experiences, challenging concepts of personal narratives and even individual authorship. Employing meta-narrative elements, most of their films together reflect on the process of their own creation. 

In some ways, though, Point and Line to Plane represents a departure for Bohdanowicz. Its form is less rigorous, guided more by intuition than chronology. Her state of mind, filtered through Audrey’s character, untethers the experience of living and feeling from only the world we can see. This vulnerability bleeds through the frame, and in the isolation of a pandemic, into our living rooms and bedrooms. As much as it is a film about the specifics of grief and loss, it is also about loneliness. So much of the film is looking outwards, through panes of glass, trying to make sense of a world that keeps spinning despite everything. 

Speaking to Sofia Bohdanowicz through Zoom, Seventh Row discussed the origins of Point and Line to Plane, the complications that come with shooting in Russia, and working in creative nonfiction. 

Seventh Row (7R): Could you discuss the origin of Point and Line to Plane?

Sofia Bohdanowicz: It’s very much a film that happened to me. It was made by way of looking at variables around me and incorporating them into the film. The film wasn’t mapped out with a certain plan in mind. It was a series of events that kept folding into the film. 

It started when I was in New York City, two weeks before my friend Jack passed away. I wanted to see this exhibition by Hilma af Klint, and I got the dates wrong. I showed up a day early, and they were setting up the show. I used to be an art archivist and take photos of fine art in rich people’s homes. I would put them in an archive and document them. I love watching people install art and just seeing the back-end of things. 

There was something about being left at arm’s length, like the character Audrey was in Veslemøy’s Song. Not having access to this exhibition seemed very funny to me. I just knew that it was important to shoot it. I shot the installation [of the exhibition] on my iPhone in 4K. The next day, I went back to see it. I became fascinated with these Venn diagrams in Hilma’s work, which reminded me of these patterns that I had seen in these blotting strips from my neighbour Jaan [Poldaas]’s work.

I took a photo of one of these Venn diagrams, and I sent it to my friend Rachel, and said, “This reminds me of Jaan’s work.” Five days later, Jaan passed away. He had cancer. We knew that he would pass, but it still felt very sudden. It was very shocking. Ten days later, I was in Vienna, and my friend Jack passed away. I was trying to present a film at the Biennale at the same time. It was difficult, but the first thing that happened to me was that I noticed all of these Mozart balls. It felt like this cruel, sick joke that I was just looking at this candy that we would eat all the time in this beautiful city [in the moment] where something sad and tragic had happened. 

What I came to learn is that, when tragedy strikes, your brain tries to grasp at reality. How did I come to where I am now? Your brain just can’t rationalize it. There needs to be a bigger meaning. It was so painful for me to lose such a dear friend and close collaborator. He was my first producer when I was first making work out of film school. This has to mean something. The first coincidence that I found was that [Jack] and Mozart had the same birthday, and I was in Vienna when it happened.

I had this moment at his funeral where his sister said, “It doesn’t matter what you say or what you do in life. People will forget about that, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.” It’s this quote that a lot of people say, but it hit me. I started thinking about Kandinsky’s paintings and how Jack and I had a love of Kandinsky. That was the first thing that we connected on. 

I bought him a package of magnets from the Guggenheim. I started thinking about him and Hilma af Klint, because she was a predecessor to Kandinsky. She was making non-objective art before he was, but she wasn’t noticed because she was a woman. I just started digging around with those coincidences.

What was interesting is that her work was exhibited in the Guggenheim, which is a spiral temple. Her work wasn’t being exhibited while she was alive, and before she died, she predicted her work would be shown in such a structure. The year that she died, Frank Lloyd Wright started drawing spirals. And then he designed the Guggenheim for Bosley Kandinsky because it was supposed to be a temple for non-objective art and to showcase art where artists were trying to show invisible forces. That’s what connected me to Kandinsky. The thing that was interesting with Hilma, as well, aside from the fact that she was an unknown contemporary alongside Kandinsky, is that Jack passed away on her birthday and he was actually in New York that same weekend as I was, but I didn’t know.

The project stemmed from this act of magical thinking that Joan Didion describes very clearly in The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s based on Freud’s theory that your brain is really just trying to rationalize [the unknown]. It’s a way of continuing the relationship with someone who is gone by looking for signs and deriving meaning from it. That’s what I was doing — and very desperately, at that. I was just kind of collecting things and trying to make sense of it all. 

7R: The spiral is also like film moving through a camera. 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: That was another layer I was discovering, that some of her [Hilma af Klint’s] work was displaying capture methods. When they were developing motion picture cameras, they started to show films in cinemas and were experimenting with the Zoetrope. It was fascinating that she was capturing the future, but also I think trying to explain, through her work, what was happening at the time and how artists in the future might be able to convey their messages. She has this one series, in particular, and whenever I look at it, these paintings look like a film strip.

7R: When we last spoke, about MS Slavic 7, you spoke about not having a script, in the traditional sense. You don’t have one here either. At what point, when you’re assembling the film, are you creating the structure? How does that process work? 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: I wrote this letter to my grandmother Joan, who was in my first feature film, Never Eat Alone. She also knew Jack and loved him very much. All of this material just started spewing out of me in the letter. It’s a strange film because I shot at the Guggenheim before Jack died. But there is this thing that happens with grieving where the way you perceive time is nonlinear. Everything in my mind started to get very jumbled. I thought it would be interesting to construct it as a way to go back in time and wonder: if Jack and I had connected in New York, if we had seen each other, what would that have looked like?

For the narrative, it was simpler to move Hilma’s exhibition after his passing. It started with this letter, and then I knew that this iPhone footage would come in handy. The letter went up to the end of the Guggenheim exhibition. Then, I wasn’t sure where it was going to go. I thought it might end there, but what ended up happening is I took a research trip to Russia, and I was in Iceland, as well. I just had this feeling that it was important to have a Bolex on hand, which is inconvenient to travel with, but [I knew I was] going to make it work and just shoot things that feel meaningful to me.

When I was in Russia, I was afraid to shoot outside. because I am a woman, I was there by myself, and there are many laws about shooting in Russia. If you shoot a government building, for example, even by accident, you can get fined or put in prison. I was always worried about shooting by myself and how it would work. It ended up being fine. 

When I started shooting out of my window first, as an exercise to start to feel comfortable, within like five minutes of shooting, my doorbell rang, and I came to the door, and there were five men in these electrical suits. They needed to hook up my gas again. I was super paranoid and wondered, are they here because I’m filming and I’m in trouble? 

I was wound up and anxious. As a result, I didn’t load my film correctly. The pressure plate in my camera wasn’t in properly. I was also still grieving and in a weird state of mind, but what started happening — and this is why I love working on film — is that the circumstances and the energy that I was emitting were picked up in the material. Working on film affords these kinds of mistakes. I got the courage to shoot out on the street and had this amazing day of shooting where I shot these canals, and then I filmed this violin lesson at the St. Petersburg music conservatory.

Then, I saw that the pressure plate was out of place, and I lost my mind. I was like, how could this happen? I went to great lengths to get this camera here. What a disaster. I’m a professional. This is so embarrassing. What am I going to do? It took me a long time to get over it. Most of the footage was decent, I would say 60% of it, but then the other 40%, many great shots were just shaky. I was becoming open to incorporating this thing that [seemed like] a disaster while I was there, and looking at it as a gift. Instead of this being the end of the world, how can this make my film more interesting and unique?

When I came home, I picked up Kandinsky’s book Point and Line to Plane. I found these eerie passages. They were about observing the world through a pane of glass and how being able to resonate with the outside world depends on your capacity to enter the street. Once you see something that matters to you, the world starts to vibrate, and things start to resonate, just like a pressure plate that’s unlatched in a camera. It felt like such a big discovery. It felt like these passages had mirrored what had happened to me in Russia. My process of making the film came with experimenting, being open to intuition, and incorporating mistakes. I had a hard time doing so, overcoming those obstacles and folding them into the work and letting the work be stronger.

7R: This is also another story about Audrey. In a way, it feels like a natural progression from the last time we saw her, but she’s changed so much, as well. How do you prepare with Deragh Campbell for a new iteration of Audrey?

Sofia Bohdanowicz: Audrey is always in her universe. Every time, the universe resets itself, in terms of format, family, and circumstance. We’re always prioritizing her journey and her quest. The world’s rules always connect to whatever she’s researching or whatever she’s seeking to accomplish — whether that is trying to take back a sound recording from an archive in New York City, whether that’s trying to exhibit letters, or whether that’s trying to find her long lost love. The rules of the film have always been to showcase that want and need and desire of a task that’s never quite accomplished in the film. 

Deragh is a very close friend of mine, and she witnessed me grieve very intensively. I admire her so much as a performer and just as a human being. Many personal elements were learned in the process because she was so close to me when it happened. 

When I wrote the letter, it felt like it came from me, but it also felt like I was kind of transmitting Audrey’s voice. I shared the text with Deragh. I always touch base with her about how things are being shaped and how they’re being formulated. Sometimes, we write very closely together, but this was something that I wrote completely on my own. 

For every project, she’s always very involved with her wardrobe. She chose her outfit and decided that she would wear the same outfit throughout the film to embody this kind of time-travelling ghost. She’s also this blank canvas, always kind of blending into every environment. She’s this porous human being as she moves through all of these different states of mind. 

She workshopped the text with me. I think she was afraid of portraying a person that was grieving because she hasn’t had an experience with intense grief before. For her, it was about embodying that sense of fatigue. She’s not a method actor, so she didn’t think back to difficult memories; she doesn’t try to access that to have a performance. She thinks of emotion and physicality and how she can embody that in the moment. 

When we were working on the film, it was really hard. We shot in my apartment over four days. “Now you’re house-sitting, now you are in St. Petersburg, now you’re in the Guggenheim.” She always had to access this palette of emotions, reactions, and all of this internal strife. I would show her the footage in response to what I had captured. I had this rough assembly, and I laid out all of the footage, and then I laid out her voiceover and then basically inserted her into the film.

7R: This film feels like a continued study in your work on different mediums: literature, music, and now painting. Is that intentional? 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: I’m assuming MS Slavic 7 was very much about literature, Veslemøy’s Song is very much about music, and this one was very much about fine art. It isn’t intentional. I just try to be open to these variables and these influences, and when something starts tugging at me, I just say, “It’s time to shoot.” I just trust it. With this project, the desire to hop into fine art and to explore theory from Kandinsky was, I feel, something that chose me.

I know that it might sound a little over the top. I never really was a very spiritual person, and I never looked at coincidence that acutely before. After what I experienced, as I was moving through these stages of grief, I felt like I had a virus or was ill. With this passage of grief, it changed my way of looking at the world. I came to believe that there are forces that we can’t see or control. 

For me, the most beautiful discovery was reading this passage by Hilda Rebay in Point and Line to Plane, who studied with Kandinsky and was also a fine artist. She said that his canvases are these promises that eternal life continues to exist in his work because all of his paintings are representations of music and sound on the canvas. He was an artist that experienced synesthesia. He would associate colours with specific instruments. For him, it was about illustrating sound and forces. 

You can’t destroy matter. You can create it, but it doesn’t go away. So for me, it was this promising thing. My friend has passed away, but his memory exists in these moments where I encounter things that resonate and remind me of him. I had always been a fan of Kandinsky, but I think that the way that I was thrust into this vortex made me have more of a profound connection [with his work].

There are tangible things that we can’t explain or things that we do naturally, but there is a cogent scientific way of explaining it. Like in Hilma’s paintings, she was commissioned by a spirit named Amaliel to make these paintings, and in many of her paintings, she mirrored scientific discoveries of that time, like the development of the X-Ray, atoms, and all of these invisible things that we can’t see without instruments. Things that we can’t perceive with our naked eye, but things that we sense intuitively. Just because we can’t perfectly articulate them doesn’t mean that knowledge isn’t there.

7R: Do you have different approaches when shooting different cities? 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: With the Guggenheim, I can’t go in there with a Bolex, so I shot that footage on my iPhone. I transferred it to 16mm. I took the footage that I liked, and I assembled it into an edit, and then I shot it off my computer screen with a super 16 Bolex camera. I liked the way that it looked. It’s stripped of colour, but also flat. It looks like film, but it feels like something is slightly wrong. For me, that format kind of mirrored what grieving feels like. You feel normal, but there’s something slightly off. I had seen that done in Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto (2018). In some spaces where you don’t have permits to shoot, an iPhone can be useful. I liked experimenting with that format for New York City and spaces that were difficult to access. 

In St. Petersburg, there was some anxiety, obviously just in terms of access and shooting by myself, because that is how I work. I made this film with a small budget, though the bulk of the money came out of the TFCA award. Because I was so scared, my approach was to shoot what I can, try not to get too riled up, get the film out of the country, and try not to have it go through the X-Ray at the airport — which, of course, it did. I got into a lot of trouble when I was trying to exit Russia because the camera lens was so long, it looked like a machine gun.

When I was shooting out of my apartment window, I lived on a street where there was a military station set up. One angle from my window was beautiful, and I wanted to shoot it, but I couldn’t because I was afraid that people might think it was a gun and shoot at me. In St. Petersburg, there’s a lot of beauty for me to capture. Even being in the Hermitage and shooting on my iPhone, I was terrified. I wanted to try to make it work. I felt like I was sneaking around trying to steal all of these images. 

Iceland was a lucky stop-over. I was there with Jacqueline Mills helping her with a new project she’s working on. For whatever reason, while I was there, I became obsessed with filming mountains. I was up in the North of Iceland, close to the West fjords in a small town called Blendeds in the winter. I realized later on, when I was doing a lot of reading, my fascination with mountains literally embodied this up and down motion that I was experiencing. Some days I was elated, and then other days, I couldn’t get out of bed. There’s this great passage in King Lear where Lear is talking about how there’s a storm coming, and people are like, you need to be careful and to take cover. And he says something like, the storm doesn’t compare to the violence that’s happening in my mind.

I started becoming fascinated with filming these mountains and doing these quick, disruptive pans because, in my day-to-day life, my exterior experience was still, but inside, I felt like I was on fire all the time. I just felt so disturbed. For every location, it’s just about what can I shoot? How can I make it feasible? How can this be done? Which format suits the kind of access that I have? I usually don’t have expectations because you always end up being pleasantly surprised with what you end up shooting. For example, that violin lesson was very much a last-minute thing that popped on my plate through a friend of a friend who knew someone at the music conservatory. I wasn’t expecting it to happen, but I just was able to sneak in because I asked politely.

7R: You talk a lot about surveillance and this disconnect between the outward appearance and inward experience. 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: There is this dissonance between being a person who’s all by themself and out in public grieving. I’m super anxious, and I’m paranoid. I was unwell when I was making this film. I still think that I’m grieving to a certain extent. 

You also just can’t announce what you’re doing to everyone all the time when you’re shooting in these spaces. Most of the time, I didn’t have access to them — and that energy factors into the final image. I always feel very self-conscious and worried and paranoid. I think that’s part of why the pressure plate ended up becoming unlatched. 

The intensity going into the film is felt during the output. I constantly feel like I’m at war with my environment, surroundings, and myself. I’m trying to respect people, respect the public space that I’m in, and scoop up images. That’s why you can’t see anyone’s faces when you’re in the Guggenheim. And that’s why everyone is from afar. I would never feature an individual who doesn’t want to be in one of my films, especially because I am making it in a subtle and slight way.

7R: Can you talk a little bit about the film’s score? 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: Stefana Fratila is such a talented composer. I was going to York University; this was my thesis film at York. I was walking through this corridor like I would every day when I was going in for this archiving course that I was taking. I would hear this ringing, and I thought it was an alarm, but I really liked it. I wanted to record it with my iPhone because I just found the sound’s quality to be so interesting, and it felt like such a happy accident. I realized that it wasn’t an alarm. It was actually a sound installation done by Stefana Fratila at the art gallery of York University. 

I got in touch with her, and she ended up making a score with crystal bowls. They’re pastel coloured, and you play the rims, or you just hit them. The sound resonates. The pastel colour ties back to Hilma and her work and its aesthetics. It also ties back to the idea of sound and resonance and energy that we can’t see and how that impacts us. Stefana wanted to play with the idea of binaural beats because it can be used in sound therapy to heal people, but they can also make people sick and make people feel on edge.

She did a fabulous job of watching the film and choosing the moments where things should make people feel a little bit on edge. It was Jacqueline Mill’s idea — the sound designer and editor on the film — to have this kind of pin-drop moment at the end where the sound drops out when Audrey says [the final line of the film], “If you can hear me, answer with the sound of colour.” We’ve just been saturated with sound and colour, but in this moment, we hear absolutely nothing. For Stefana and I, it was an experiment. When the sound dropped out, we wanted to see if the ringing still continues in people’s ears.

I think that [the score] also embodies what grieving can feel like. There’s this constant ringing in your body and your heart. You’re living your day to day very normally, but there’s just this thing that you’re dragging around with you. This constant ringing throughout the film, sonically, embodied this grieving process where you constantly feel like you’re cocooned. The world is there, and it’s happening around you, but there’s this layer around you where you cannot completely access it the way you used to.

7R: You treat art as part of reality, almost like a collage. How do you integrate all these different elements? 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: It’s a tethering together of different experiences, emotions, lived moments and trying to connect them to something bigger. What this film is, is this struggle to ask myself,  is there something bigger? My neighbor Jaan and Jack died that year, but three other people in my life also passed away. It was a very freaky year of me asking, is there something bigger?

How does this connect? It must mean something because for this amount of pain to not mean something is too depressing for me. It doesn’t matter if there’s something bigger. I need to find a way to rationalize it or make something of it. These observations on Hilma’s and Kandinsky’s work kind of became my springboard for that. It was about moving through these emotional ruminations and struggling to understand what was happening outside of me. This whole thing just surged together. 

7R: Does it scare you at all that you were kind of sharing your grief? 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: It is scary; it’s a very emotional process for me. It is extraordinarily painful to talk about it. There’s also the fear of looking foolish. For example, Personal Shopper was a big inspiration for me, as well. What was interesting is that Jack had a twin, just like the character in Personal Shopper. In a few of my shots at the Guggenheim, there’s these twins called Eva & Adele. They’re a couple, and they’re women, and they’re ‘twins’. 

All of these coincidences in terms of twins popping up never actually made it into the film. When you stumble upon that mammoth amount of material, you kind of stop and ask yourself, what is going on here? Why am I happening upon all of this? I think it’s the first time in my life where I am stuck on what people will think of me. It would be terrible to make myself this vulnerable for the film and for it not to resonate with people. For me, it’s very much a risk that’s worthwhile. What was naive was thinking that making this film, that having a vehicle to put all of my thoughts, would make the pain disappear.

I was wrong. The grieving did continue. It helped. It was certainly a therapeutic process, but it didn’t exactly fix everything. I’ve been fortunate because the film premiered at the end of July at Marseilles. And that was a great premiere because the theatre was 30% full. Everyone is masked. You can’t see anyone’s faces. If I was going into a packed theatre and was talking to a huge audience, I think it would have been too much for me. It’s been a gift to present the film in this way. 

There’s also something that our current climate facilitates for me that makes it a lot easier to show the film. The fear always is, what if I cry? I cried when I defended my film as my thesis. I cried through a big portion of it to the point where someone said, “You know, you can stop. “And I was like, “No, I just need a minute.” I cried, and I let it all out. And then I kept going. But for a thesis that was about grieving, it was quite appropriate.

I do think that the film is suited to the pandemic strangely enough. There’s a weird parallel between the film and this person who is kind of a quarantined on their own, travelling through memory and thought to search for their lost friend’s essence.

I feel vulnerable, but I think the way people have been navigating it with me has been great. I feel very fortunate that I get to be able to share this story with other people. I hope that for people who have gone through the grieving process, there’s something in there that they might connect with. 

7R: Would you consider yourself a filmmaker who works in creative nonfiction?

Sofia Bohdanowicz: It’s actually the first time that I’ve heard the term creative nonfiction. It’s always been hybrid or docu-fiction, but creative nonfiction is the best summation. It’s nonfiction, but it’s told in a way that is unique and unprecedented. That’s always been my goal with these narratives. I have a deep appreciation for the classical documentary form, but for me, I’m constantly asking myself how can this be done differently? How can we push things or tell stories or share facts, but in ways that engages audience members?

Many people didn’t know what to do with me. “She’s not experimental enough; it’s not narrative enough.” I was having a hard time being programmed. Once an audience experiences the film, part of it doesn’t belong to me anymore. It belongs to you. I can self label my work quite ambiguously and not be perfectly specific all the time. I’m okay with that. I’m okay with having a fluid perspective on it. I warmly welcome people’s definitions of the work.

7R: Are you currently working on any new projects? 

Sofia Bohdanowicz: I am working with Deragh Campbell. We’re writing a new script for a new feature film. It’s a take-off of Veslemøy’s Song. It’s about my grandfather’s violin mentor, Kathleen Parlow, another forgotten female in Canadian history who was a well-known violinist who was just kind of erased. We’re lucky because we’re in the writing development phase, and we took the project to the Lab at Marseille, which was terrific. We won an award, which was great.

It was nice to get a thumbs up on the project early on. We’re going to continue to develop the script and hopefully shoot at the end of next year, but we’re trying not to push it because the world is a pretty erratic place right now. I feel very fortunate. I know that there are people who are in some tight pickles, but the timing has worked out. 

READ: More coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival >>

READ: Our wrap-up of the best Canadian shorts at TIFF ’20, which included Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Point and Line to Plane >>

READ: Sofia Bohdanowicz on Maison du Bonheur >>

READ: Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell on MS Slavic 7 >>

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TIFF Interview: Sophy Romvari on Still Processing and personal cinema

Sophy Romvari’s deeply personal documentary short, Still Processing, is a triumph of personal cinema. Romvari discusses how to make a film that’s both personal and universal and how to get your name out there as a short filmmaker. Keep up to date with our TIFF ’20 coverage.

Director Sophy Romvari in front of a still from her film Still Processing. This is an interview from TIFF.
TIFF Interview: Sophy Romvari on Still Processing and personal cinema.

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In Sophy Romvari’s personal documentary, Still Processing, she holds memories in her hands. After a long negotiation with her parents over her desire to make a film reflecting on her two older brothers’ deaths, her father presents her with a box of photos, videos, and film negatives. We watch as, for the first time, she takes them out. In black and white photographs taken by her father, we see children at rest and play. In one photo, a young Sophy is captured in closeup, looking directly into the camera. It’s a confrontational image, and given the film’s subject, it’s hard not to read melancholy in her expression. The photos capture an almost foreboding doom. They capture fleeting expressions that are transformed by events that follow. 

On Still Processing

The film’s title gestures at the double meaning of living with grief and also the process of discovering these photos and literally processing the negatives. Much of the film unfolds at York University, where Romvari was studying her Master’s degree at the time of shooting (Still Processing is her thesis film). The school’s brutalist institutional atmosphere contrasts with the film’s emotional intensity. Virtually wordless, Romvari’s film uses reflective subtitles at the bottom of the screen, adding context and insight.

Still Processing treads a careful line between intimacy and vulnerability. The filmmaking invites viewers to witness and engage rather than merely invade a private moment. In the difficult realm of dealing with profound loss, Romvari touches on rarely expressed ideas and emotions. Though very much her film, the use of Romvari’s father’s photos and her brother Ben’s music express, through collaboration, the fortitude of familial bonds.

How Still Processing fits into Romvari’s body of work

Still early in her career, Still Processing feels like a natural progression for Romvari who has made a series of  films that interweave the personal and the universal. In Nine Behind (2016), the first film she made after completing her undergrad at the University of Vancouver, a young woman calls her grandfather in Budapest to learn about the Hungarian film industry. Shot in black and white, and autobiographical without being autobiography, the film is as much about reflecting on the alienation and loneliness of the main character’s disconnect from language and history, as it is about the subject of the phone calls themselves. It is a film about absence rather than presence, an empty apartment and an unfulfilled desire to connect with family members who are literally and spiritually so far away. 

Sophy Romvari’s Nine Behind and Pumpkin Movie

Nine Behind has a formal rigour that Romvari somewhat abandons in some of her later work. In movies that follow, such as Pumpkin Movie, there is a suppleness in the image that betrays how quickly it is made but lends a sense of intimacy few filmmakers can ever achieve. Pumpkin Movie (2017), about two old friends continuing a pumpkin carving tradition over Skype, the script was partially crowd-sourced as Romvari asked people to submit negative encounters with men. The integration of laptops and online video chatting further highlights how Romvari’s cinema often reflects how technology shapes our relationships with others, for better and worse, and how it has the power to capture and transform memory and ideas. 

Norman, Norman and Dog Years

With Norman, Norman (2018), Romvari shifts focus to mortality. Norman, Norman, a portrait of Romvari’s elderly dog, inquires into the finite nature of existence and the future technological promises that challenge our very conception of life and death. Beyond just a cinematic portrait, the film inquires into Barbara Streisand’s decision to clone her dogs and what it might mean for the future. What happens when death no longer signals non-existence? How will that change our relationships with those around us? 

This film’s beauty lies in its simplicity and its deep affection for its subject. It matches up beautifully with Romvari’s In Dog Years (2019), an expanded portrait of elderly dogs and their owners. Both films, quite radical in their framing, adopt a non-human perspective, bringing us down to the eye-line of animals. They’re films that echo with love and wonderment, even if they’re inflected with the tragedy of impending loss.

Working in creative nonfiction

Much of Sophy Romvari’s cinema operates in the tenuous world of creative nonfiction. They’re films that eschew traditional narrative structure and engage with artificial elements to come to a greater sense of truth. Her style, still evolving, reveals a filmmaker unafraid to take risks and make films off the cuff. They’re movies that fully embrace the possibilities of short-form storytelling.

Sophy Romvari’s commitment to short films has recently extended to another project, called Exquisite Shorts. Inspired by conversations surrounding festival programming for short films, Romvari launched a crowdfunding campaign to create an alternative short film distribution model for and by filmmakers that focuses on the sustainability of the form, including fair compensation for creators. 

Speaking with Sophy Romvari over Zoom, we discussed the making of Still Processing, her ideas surrounding personal filmmaking, and building online communities. 

The evolution of Still Processing

Seventh Row (7R): Still Processing was your Master’s project at York University in Toronto. Could you talk about the evolution of the project?

Sophy Romvari: I applied to York at the end of 2016. I already had the film concept, pretty much as it appears now. There would be multiple scenes that were just different phases of processing the photographs and looking at the videos. I never wrote a full script. I followed that basic outline from when I applied to York. 

To that end, the concept didn’t change very much. It was the emotions that came out that changed or evolved [the project]. Since applying to do my Master’s, between then and now, I’ve worked on a lot of films dealing with personal experiences and the idea of processing experiences through filmmaking. It’s a little bit like they were the pre-production for this film. 

I wanted to go to York because I heard great things about the faculty. I was going to need time, space and support to make it [Still Processing] and objective guidance, and I got that from my supervising team. When I got into the program, my parents were still pretty guarded about making a film about the subject. But they were excited for me. Then, I started to say to them I wanted to make this film and what it was about. That started a long negotiation period with them, and it was a year before I got their permission. In the program, I was just doing coursework and research. Anything I could to prepare to make the film, knowing it was possible that I would not get to make it. 

Getting permission

There were a lot of really emotional, intense conversations between my parents and me. I think part of it was that they couldn’t imagine a film that wasn’t a documentary about what happened. They couldn’t imagine that it would be something that wouldn’t touch on the specifics. I think that was scary for them; they didn’t want me to make a big exposé documentary about our family. I tried to describe it and give them examples. But it was still really hard for them to see it and to understand. 

At a certain point, I think it just struck my parents how much it meant for me to make the film. And they gave me their blessings. My dad even wrote a letter which is included in the film. It meant so much to me to have that sense of artistic collaboration with him, but also emotional collaboration. 

Whose story is Still Processing?

There’s a complicated negotiation with this film: whose story is it? Because it’s mine, my brother Ben’s, my parents’ and then, of course, my brothers’, David and Jonathan. You can’t pull apart those experiences. Trying to find the right way to tell the story from my experience and being gentle and considerate of everyone else’s experience took a long time. I wanted to make sure the film was never just for me, but for my family. I finally shot the film in 2018.

After I got permission from my parents, they mailed me a box of all kinds of things. There were little knick-knacks that were all from my dad’s time and experience in film school. But I didn’t open that box; I didn’t look at it. I got the box about six months before I made the film. 

Preparing for the shoot

I knew I was going to shoot the film with my DP, Devan Scott. He has shot almost all my films. Then, it was about getting him to fly out from Vancouver. We set aside ten days to shoot the film. Most of it was shot at York University on campus. We had already done a pre-scout of the location on a different trip when he came out to shoot In Dog Years. 

We already knew every room we wanted to use and every angle. Now, it was just about creating the right atmosphere and space to let the film happen. We shot for 10 days, not because we needed to shoot for 10 days but because we wanted to do one scene a day, which is not normal for a short film. We wanted to set aside enough time to not emotionally overwhelm me. Also, because it was just Devan and I shooting, we had a lot of work. We were both setting up cameras and setting up the sound. 

Opening the box

For the box opening scene at York, in the morning and a lot of the day, I felt nervous because I knew I was going to be seeing these photographs for the first time. We set up two or three cameras, almost like a television shooting setup, similar to what we did for Pumpkin Movie. It was a way to capture all angles so that you don’t have to go back and reshoot anything, so it can all be live. 

Once we started rolling, I walked into the scene with the box. Devan put headphones in, and he just checked out because he wanted to give me full emotional space. I went through the box in real time. We filmed that shot for about 45 minutes. I just looked at everything and let whatever came up come up. We shot a few inserts after that, but we didn’t redo any shots or punch in for a closeup or anything; it was all done in that one [setup]. We did a similar setup for most of the film; we just wanted to capture the actual emotion. 

Preparing to watch the footage

I sat on the footage for about a year because it was too overwhelming to look at. Finally, when I started to look at it, I wasn’t sure how I would turn it into a film that other people could watch. I never imagined it would take as long as it did, that’s for sure. But at the same time, I think it couldn’t have been made any faster. Now that it’s playing for people, I’ve never felt such unreal anticipation. Most of my shorts I made so quickly. This one is a huge, completely different experience. 

A woman stands in a dark room in front of a film processing device, which illuminates her silhouette.
Sophy Romvari in Still Processing. Courtesy of Sophy Romvari.

Sophy Romvari on “Personal” cinema

7R: Could you explain your connection with making “Personal” Cinema?

Sophy Romvari: Making personal films came naturally because I just had a lot to process. I did a four-year undergrad at the University of Vancouver, and I was getting the opportunity to direct short films. They were all scripted short films that other students had written. The program emphasized the separation of roles. They don’t want people to make their own films, and they don’t want people to be auteurs, because they’re trying to train people into the film industry in Vancouver. It’s a very streamlined system. 

I directed four short films, which were all about middle-aged white men having a midlife crisis. They were great experiences for me to try out different stylistic approaches. I definitely ripped off Lynch or Wes Anderson or all these typical film school inspirations. I had the opportunity to learn a lot of technical skills as I gained confidence as a director. When I finished the degree, I felt empty about the films I was making. 

On family and Nine Behind

My family is Hungarian, and I spoke Hungarian for the first few years of my life, but I don’t speak it anymore. My parents were from there, and they never went back after they immigrated for very complicated reasons. I’ve always had this real longing to reconnect with that part of my identity. Nine Behind was my first attempt to start bridging that gap. I cast an actress to play a surrogate version of myself. Getting to make that film was a huge shift because I was like, “Wow, I care about this, and I want to share this with people.” I found a way to make a film that was at once personal and universal. That’s always been what I’m trying to get: something that is born out of really personal [experience] that’s also something that people can inject their own experience into. 

From Nine Behind onward, I started to delve into those experiences, diving deeper into this hybrid documentary world. I went to True/False [documentary film festival] with Pumpkin Movie where so many films were doing this hybrid technique, and I was like, “That’s it. That’s what I like. That’s my mode.” I find that hybrid filmmaking and personal filmmaking allow you to be honest about the fact that you are making a film, and there are inherent artificialities to it. I find it to be a more honest depiction of reality. 

The potential of personal filmmaking for emerging filmmakers

Personal filmmaking has a lot of potential, especially for emerging filmmakers or people who are trying to get into the film industry. I don’t like this idea that it has to be a stepping stone. Some people just want to make shorts. They’re so much more accessible, and they cost less money. Personal filmmaking is also a budgetary thing. You can use what you have around you. Depending on the way you want to execute work, it can be a lot cheaper to make self-reflection or something that you’ve experienced rather than a genre piece. A sci-fi or horror film, of course, can also be deeply personal. But I think that’s why there is a lot of Canadian hybrid personal filmmaking.

A viewing list for Still Processing

7R: From what I understand, you also built a “viewing” list for the project. I imagine part of it was a requirement for your degree, but can you talk about the films that informed Still Processing?

Sophy Romvari: With my past films, there was never really a reference point of what inspired that work. For me, it’s more that I’m watching films and being like, “Oh, a film can do that!” or “A film doesn’t have to include a narrative structure in a traditional sense!” For Still Processing, I built a self-directed study of 20-odd films that were dealing with personal filmmaking or documentary/hybrid and trauma, these kinds of light-hearted tags.

The more helpful thing about watching those films was seeing the things I didn’t want to do and didn’t want the film to be. I wanted to build the film without these obvious emotional beats. You can’t count on people caring about your personal life if you don’t give them a reason to care. [Watching personal films, you feel sometimes that filmmakers] want you to care about something that they care about, but they don’t necessarily give you a reason to. The way to get around that is to create a very distinct access point from the very beginning. For example, what are the stakes of this film? To keep someone’s interest in the film, I knew that I had to reveal early on the specific grief that I was dealing with, to have people understand what I was grappling with.

Inspiration for the subtitles

A big part of that came through in the subtitles. When I shot the film, I knew that I would include some pre-text [an explanatory intertitle before the film] or voiceover, but I wasn’t sure what. The subtitles allow me to say what I wasn’t able to say or show in the film. I didn’t want to do it in voiceover because I think that can be overbearing and would pull away from the experience as you’re watching it. The films of Su Friedrich used subtitles similarly. I didn’t want just to deliver information; I wanted there to be a poetic quality to what I was saying. I needed to find the right way to phrase things. It took a long time to find the right words. 

There was also a film by this German filmmaker, Heinz Emigholz, called Streetscapes [Dialogue], which was recommended to me by Lydia [Ogwang], where he’s talking to a psychiatrist the entire time. The way he frames the shots with canted angles of this crazy architecture was an inspiration for framing the shots around York University and wanting to show that space the way that we did.

I also watched a lot of Akerman, like every female filmmaker doing personal work does. 

Filming at York University

7R: Can you discuss using York University as a backdrop? Was that always a part of your plan for the film?

Sophy Romvari: I wanted to create a very distinct contrast and juxtaposition between the footage that I was filming with myself and the photographs and videos that my dad had made. It was important to me to have the warmth of the photographs and videos be in complete contrast with the coldness and almost futuristic aesthetic of York. The blues and the grays and the winter of the time that we shot helped emphasize that visual juxtaposition. 

We took a long time walking around [the school], finding different windows and angles with interesting shadows. Most of those spaces I had never been in during my actual classes. The main room that we found for the box opening was a painting studio. It just had these beautiful windows which created a great space for doing that work. We didn’t have to use any lights for shooting because we had this beautiful natural light coming in from this wall of windows. 

Sophy Romvari on representing a period of her life spent at York University

I wanted this film to represent this period of my life. I was doing my Master’s at York. Without being too metatextual, I wanted to make a film about me making a film. I wanted to make the film about the process of doing my thesis and uncovering these emotions in the space in which I did it. Of course, there’s the added element that I had access to all those spaces so I didn’t have to pay for any of them. That kept the budget low. Almost the entire budget was just flying Devan to Toronto and then paying him to shoot the film.

Also, shooting in the winter lent itself to that sort of cold contrast. I wanted this sense of being imported into the space of the photographs and videos, and then being pulled back into the cold reality of what I was facing. That contrast, visually, was helped out by the brutalism of York and this sort of institutional space.

Working with DP Devan Scott

7R: You’ve already spoken about your DP, Devan, but could you talk about your working relationship? Considering the film’s scale, and your vulnerability, I imagine a lot of trust was involved.

Sophy Romvari: Devan and I met after I graduated from my undergrad. We did not go to film school together. He went to UBC. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend when I had just written the script for Nine Behind. I did not have a great time in my undergrad in terms of the school’s dynamics and creativity. It was a very competitive space, and I found it difficult to forge healthy working relationships. I didn’t leave the program with a solid group of filmmakers [to collaborate with] because everyone had very different ideas about the kinds of films they wanted to make. 

I met Devan, just by happenstance, during a film festival, and I just started telling him I wrote the Nine Behind script. He was like, “Do you want me to shoot it?” I was like, who is this completely out-of-the-blue generous person that I’ve never met before who just offered to shoot my film? That’s very Devan-like; he’s super generous with his time and very eager and curious to learn about other people’s processes. He’s the kind of DP that works with different people, and the films always look and feel different.

He shot Nine Behind, and suddenly, rather than creating films being a stressful experience, it was a joy. The discovery and curiosity Devan brings lent a lot to the films. I knew that it would be a very intense and intimate experience with Still Processing, and I would never have considered shooting with anyone else. 

How Devan Scott works

Working with Devan is like a one-man show. He shoots the film; he knows everything about lenses; and he knows everything about technology. Then, as we’re shooting, he’ll import the footage, and he’ll do a pre-colour grade on it. So I already know how it’s going to look. 

Devan shoots for his colour grading. He’s sometimes shooting a little bit overexposed or underexposed because he knows exactly what the colour grading will adapt to. I know so much more about how the film will look at the end working with Devan, so I don’t have to think about those things while I’m making the film. We do a lot of pre-shooting also, so I don’t have to wait to see what the film will look like. We’ll do test shots of everything. 

On photos in Still Processing

7R: The title and the subject refers to the tactile nature of photography. Can you explain the importance of the photos?

Sophy Romvari: I grew up with a dad who was constantly photographing and filming us. It was very much part of normal day-to-day life for us, which lends itself to my ability to be vulnerable and at ease on camera. I have all of these memories of being photographed and filmed, but I never saw any of the photos because of the circumstances with my family. I’ve seen, like, one or two that were printed around the house, and my dad would send me a photograph on my birthday.

I knew there were thousands of photographs I had never seen. I had built up the anticipation of seeing them, and then when the two deaths occurred, it just made it that much more loaded. It built itself up: wanting to see these things, wanting to hold these things. Just knowing they existed was such a gift. The idea of seeing them was terrifying but exciting at the same time. I’m so lucky that I have those photos. Not everybody has documentation of their early years and not in the way that my dad did them. He’s an exceptionally talented photographer in his own right; he was studying to be a cinematographer. There’s something that feels to me like a kind of retroactive collaboration between his work and mine now. 

Some photographs had never even been developed. At York, I was lucky enough to learn the process of developing photographs. I included the teacher who taught me the process, Marcos [Arriaga], in the film. 

“I wanted to show the process of processing”

For a lack of better words, I wanted to show the process of processing. I wanted to see the photographs for the first time, and then develop the photographs for the first time, and then see this video footage for the first time, which I did with my brother Ben. It made sense to document the fact that it was happening for the first time.

When I looked at the photographs, I found those devastating. Partly because of my dad’s style. He has this very Eastern European [photography] aesthetic. They’re not like regular family album photos. They’re very intense photos of children. I have compared his work a little bit to Sally Mann. She photographs her children, and they’re all serious and intense. I read a lot about the theory of photography by Susan Sontag and Camera Lucida. 

Part of what I found interesting about the experience was the difference between seeing a photograph and what a photograph means. Photos feel so much more in line with the past, and honestly, with death. They are a record of a moment, a snapshot, and a very different experience than seeing videos. So when I saw the photographs, they made me cry. The videos made me laugh. The videos were somehow less devastating because they felt that they were happening in the moment. They felt real, something that still exists.

A young girl looks into the camera lens in this black and white photo.
One of the photos featured in the film, this one of Sophy Romvari herself. Courtesy of Sophy Romvari.

The presence of Sophy’s brother Ben in the film

7R: Can you talk a little bit about your brother Ben’s presence in the film?

Sophy Romvari: We grew up with four siblings, and now we’re the only two left, so we have a very close, sacred relationship. We’re the two youngest, also. When you have such a small family, you always have to be aware of how grateful you are for those people in your life, especially when you experienced such intense loss. Ben and I are a big part of each other’s lives. 

No one has an insight into my experience the way that Ben does. Being a sibling who loses a sibling, never mind two, is a completely different experience than being a parent that loses a child. They’re not comparable. That’s a big part of why my relationship with Ben is so important, because we have that shared experience. I needed him to be a part of the film because it was important for him to see those things and process those things alongside me.

We watched those videos and realized we both have this really terrible recall and memory ability. I’ve read a lot about how, when you experience complicated grief, it does affect your memory, and it does affect your ability to recall specifics. The whole time we were watching it, we’re like, what year was that? How old are we?  That’s why it’s really nice and lucky that we have these documents to fill in those gaps.

How Still Processing was a way of healing

7R: On Twitter, you spoke about using this film as a way of healing. What do you mean by that?

Sophy Romvari: I have this desire to teach what we’ve been talking about, personal filmmaking as a means of processing experiences. I have worked a little bit in that world with my thesis supervisor, Brenda Longfellow. She works with incarcerated women and women who’ve experienced sexual trauma. During my masters, I worked with her leading a workshop where all the women had experienced some kind of sexual trauma and were making films or visual art pieces — not about their experiences necessarily, but just whatever they wanted to in terms of processing their experiences.

I spent a lot of time watching films looking for experiences where people lose siblings in the last ten years. I never really saw a film that spoke to me; I realised it was because I needed to make that film. People look to films to feel less alone about their experiences. Part of my hope in Still Processing is that maybe I will come across people who have those experiences or similar experiences. A huge part of the impact of filmmaking or cinema is connecting people through experiences and empathy.

The Exquisite Shorts project

7R: Shifting focus a little bit: you recently wrapped up a crowdfunding project called Exquisite Shorts. It is an online shorts program that re-imagines the role of the gatekeeper in film, while still allowing filmmakers to engage critically with each other’s work. You also aim to compensate filmmakers. Can you explain why you launched this campaign?

Sophy Romvari: There is this sort of unfortunate stigma around short filmmaking as a stepping stone toward features or proof-of-concept filmmaking, which are all fine. But there should be an emphasis on the legitimacy of short films. 

Many people don’t have the access or time or ability to make a feature but have a few bucks and a couple of friends to get together and make a short film. If you want to see more diverse stories and want to see more diverse creators, support those filmmakers and support them financially because they’re not going to make these films or tell you stories if they don’t have the means to. Short films can give people that entry point.

Feeling encouraged to work within your means

I think people should feel encouraged to work within their means, but for something to be within your means, you have to provide some kind of means. In the industry, they don’t prioritize that experience at all. Short films are functioning right now on the festival circuit as, “You should be so lucky that your film is playing at this festival.” On some level, that’s true because there are so many films submitted, but there’s issues with that hierarchical system. [With this project, I’m] answering some of those concerns about the film industry and the film festival landscape. 

Supporting short filmmakers

Now, I have the money to run it and pay people, but I also know that there’s interest and enthusiasm around the idea. It’s partially about normalizing paying short filmmakers. If you want to see more work from filmmakers you admire, you have to do more than just program their work. Paying screening fees, for example, creates a different atmosphere around the experience. If you’re not being paid, it sends a message about the work’s value.

I tweeted out a letter [from experimental filmmaker] Hollis Frampton a few days ago. He was being invited by MoMA to screen his work for love and exposure. And he outlines distinctly why he should be paid for his work. He cracks down on the argument of why filmmakers shouldn’t be screening their work for free. Imagine going to the dentist and saying, “I’ll tweet about the work you did on my teeth.” You can’t pay rent in Toronto with exposure bucks. 

I’m excited to start the program and to make mistakes and learn from them. I’m running it currently just by myself, and I’m going to have the ability to shift and change things as it’s going. 

Social media, filmmaking, and promotion

7R: You are very active on social media. Can you explain how you use platforms like Twitter and Letterboxd as it relates to filmmaking and promotion? 

Sophy Romvari: As a filmmaker, it’s something that I always recommend to filmmakers who ask me how I get my work noticed. It was not a marketing plan I had. I just slowly became ingrained in this ‘Film Twitter’ subculture. I hit on this cross-section of critics, programmers, cinephiles, and filmmakers by being a part of it. It had a serious impact on my films being programmed. Honestly, if people see your work being interacted with online, a programmer, for example, might take an interest.

Especially when you’re dealing with things like blind submission, they don’t have much to go on, especially if you’re just an emerging filmmaker. For example, Pumpkin Movie, which was pretty early in my very short career, was programmed because the programmer, Chris Boeckmann, saw it on Twitter. He just happened to come across it, and he programmed it. I never submitted the film to True/False, and I got this email that I was programmed at this festival that I had heard such incredible things about. It was a huge shift for my career because it legitimized my work in a way that probably couldn’t have happened if I just had submitted it.

Being programmed like that without actually even soliciting had a huge impact on my confidence as a filmmaker.

Understanding the film community

I ended up developing the Exquisite Shorts concept. Seeing all these different complaints or confusion about the film festival circuit and just watching how those power dynamics work and learning how programmers can be, God loves them. Still, sometimes not the most ethical processes come out of that system. All of that has informed not only my filmmaking but also my ideas around filmmaking.

Letterboxd is a godsend. I always tell people to make sure your film is on Letterboxd because it’s a free platform to have people comment and react to and give feedback to your work. Right now, for Still Processing, Letterboxd is a treasure trove for me; seeing these reactions and reviews from people that I don’t know at all, in some cases, they write these really gut-wrenching reviews of my work. It’s hugely confidence-instilling for me to see that people take the time to do that.

On Twitter and Letterboxd

Twitter and Letterboxd are both free tools, but engaging with them comes with a downfall. Like everyone, sometimes, I want to log off entirely. Just put my work out there and hope that it flourishes. But I’m not at that point in my career. I think it’s hard to get to that point. The engaging can take a toll. But I genuinely have met a lot of really great people on Twitter. It’s benefited my career and just getting to meet like actual cinephiles. I think for anyone who’s living in a city or an area where there’s not a huge, robust film culture, Twitter can also be a huge saving grace.

READ: Our wrap-up of the best Canadian shorts at TIFF ’20, which included Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing >>

READ: More coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival >>

DISCOVER: More great Canadian cinema >>

This interview with Sophy Romvari on Still Processing features in our ebook on creative nonfiction…

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TIFF Interview: Reclaiming transmasculine history in No Ordinary Man

Co-directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt on how their documentary No Ordinary Man corrects the narrative around Billy Tipton, a transgender jazz musician whose life story was distorted by the media after his death. The film is now on VOD in Canada and will be released in the US later this year. Keep up to date with our TIFF ’20 coverage.

Listen to our podcast on reclaiming history and No Ordinary Man and John Ware Reclaimed

Directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt are pictured in front a black and white still of jazz musician Billy Tipton. The image features text that states this is an interview at TIFF.
TIFF Interview: Reclaiming transmasculine history in No Ordinary Man.

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How do you shoulder the responsibility of creating the first moving image representations of a person who is no longer with us? What’s more, in the case of trans jazz musician Billy Tipton, how do you make a documentary about a figure whose legacy has been distorted by mainstream media for decades after their death? It’s a responsibility that co-directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt didn’t take lightly.

The story No Ordinary Man tells is one of lost transgender history that’s finally being reclaimed. The film’s subject is Billy Tipton, an influential jazz musician who worked between the 1930s and 1970s. It wasn’t until 1989, when Tipton died in the arms of his son, Billy Jr., that Tipton’s family and the public discovered that he was assigned female at birth. After his death, Tipton’s story was twisted: Tipton was unequivocally a trans man, but the cis-dominated media presented him as a woman who dressed as a man in order to get a foot in the door in the music industry. Even the most cited text about Tipton’s life, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Dianne Middlebrook, framed his story around this harmful narrative.

In Chin-Yee and Joynt’s hands, No Ordinary Man is no ordinary biographical documentary. They go way beyond the standard archival footage and talking head interview approach to tell Tipton’s story. Joynt explained that “understanding that there was no moving image footage of Tipton was both a restriction and an opportunity for us to immediately start thinking creatively beyond the bounds of reenactment and other ways that biopics tend to be created.” The film features photos and audio recordings of Tipton, as well as his music, and his life story is told through the words of talking-head experts, most of whom are trans. But another huge part of the film are “auditions” where the filmmakers invite a whole host of diverse transmasculine actors to act out and then dissect scripted scenes from Tipton’s life. 

It’s in these audition scenes where No Ordinary Man truly comes to life. In Chin-Yee’s words, “We’re not Billy, and he didn’t leave a record to tell us what he was thinking or feeling in the specific moments we’re curious about.” So instead of telling one version of Tipton’s story, the filmmakers allow each actor to tell their own, different version, all filtered through the transmasculine perspective. We feel how the legacy of transgender historical figures reverberates through to today in the conversations the filmmakers have with these actors, as well as the conversations the actors have with each other in the waiting room, which are also included in the film.

The final piece of the emotional puzzle is Billy Jr., Tipton’s son. Through intimate vignettes of his home life where he discusses memories of his father, we feel how harmful the media’s distortion of Tipton’s life was through the testimonial of someone who was directly affected by it. We also see the healing process in action. Billy Jr. has always maintained that his father was a man, even throughout the traumatising media circus surrounding his father’s death, and even though he didn’t have the language to think of Tipton as ‘transgender’. The conversations he has on screen with activist Jamison Green and co-director Chase Joynt mark the first times Billy Jr. has ever talked to trans people about his father’s legacy. He’s visibly moved to hear how much his father’s story means to transmasculine people today, as if he’s finally achieving some sort of closure.

I spoke to Chin-Yee and Joynt over Zoom before the online premiere of No Ordinary Man at TIFF. They discussed the weight of responsibility that came with telling Billy Tipton’s story and how they jazzed up the traditional biographical documentary formula.

Seventh Row (7R): How did you both get involved with No Ordinary Man?

Aisling Chin-Yee: Our producer Sarah Spring wanted to look into making a film about Billy, so then [co-writer] Amos Mac and I came on board to write this project. Amos is a wonderful transmasculine artist and writer based out of Hollywood. We started to do interviews and research Billy’s life. We went through the archives at Stanford University. Then Chase joined our creative team as [a co-director]. The three of us moulded this project.

Chase Joynt: As a trans man interested in trans history, I’ve always been interested in who controls the story. The story of Billy Tipton’s life has always been controlled by the mainstream media. This project was an incredible opportunity to approach Tipton’s life from a trans perspective.

7R: How did you decide who you’d feature on screen as the mouthpieces for Billy’s story?

Aisling Chin-Yee: We had already been in touch with Billy Jr.. We knew we wanted to talk to him about his relationship with his father and what happened to him and his mother [in the aftermath of his father’s death], specifically when the media got hold of the narrative. 

There’s so many amazing experts, actors, artists, and writers who could talk so beautifully and deeply about Billy’s story and the trans experience. There were some people who didn’t make it into the film who we would have loved to have included.

Chase Joynt: In the early research and development phase of the project, we realised there were so many different angles through which to tell this story. 

How can we have someone on screen who can speak to what was happening in music at the time? How can we have experts in transgender history speak about what was happening in trans and gender nonconforming communities, not only at the time of Tipton’s life and music career but at the time of his death? 

And then, of course, there was the inclusion of all our incredible transmasculine actors who arrive in the casting scenes and help us to animate how and why Tipton’s story remains so important in contemporary contexts.

Actor Marquise Vilson sits at a table in an empty bar, looking into the camera.
Actor Marquise Vilson in No Ordinary Man. Image courtesy of TIFF.

7R: I loved the conceit of having actors reenact scenes from Billy’s life as a way to bring his story to life in a contemporary context. Can you talk a bit more about how that conceit came about?

Aisling Chin-Yee: That came pretty early in the writing process. We did some digging to try to find any moving images of Billy Tipton, and there weren’t any. [For audio and written records], there were his albums that he recorded, some rehearsal tapes, and a personal Christmas card that he and his family sent to his mother-in- law. But there weren’t any moving pictures of him that we could find. We knew that if we were going to write scenes or create a representation of Billy on screen, it would actually be the first time anyone would see his likeness portrayed. 

We all came to [this project] with our own lenses and biases and experiences, so we wanted  acknowledge the responsibility of representing someone who isn’t there to tell their own story. Amos and I wrote several different scenes of different points in Billy’s life that we’d learned about when researching him.

We wanted to use the process that an actor has to go through [to get into character because it is similar to] the process we’re trying to do in this film, which is asking, what was Billy thinking and feeling in that moment? We’re not Billy, and he didn’t leave a record to tell us what he was thinking or feeling in the specific moments we’re curious about. But if we put those words or that scene in the hands of a variety of different transmasculine artists and actors and activists, how will they come to interpret that story?

7R: How did you approach that casting process?

Aisling Chin-Yee: We worked with casting director Russell Boast in LA who’s quite versed in diverse casting. He was so excited about jumping on the project and making sure the casting call was written with the right language for what we were trying to do. 

We had to make it quite clear that it was a documentary so they were essentially going to be themselves doing this interpretation. We sent it out in the US, received the first batch of self-tapes and whatnot, and then set up in-person casting sessions in Los Angeles and New York. Those are the two locations you see in the film.

Chase Joynt: We didn’t in the casting call say, “We want you to come in as an expert in transmasculine history or having done a ton of research about Billy Tipton.” It really was an open call. What organically reveals itself over the course of the film is that some people have deep connections to Tipton’s story and some of them had never heard of him prior to receiving the casting call. All of those [perspectives] are such valuable contributions to a project like ours. We really followed their lead once they walked into the room.

Aisling Chin-Yee: And also because they’re all different actors who have their own process of what they would do before going into an audition. So a lot of the guys who hadn’t heard of Billy quickly went to Wikipedia and found out some information about who he was, like, “Wow he was married five times?! Oh my God!” and all these different things. 

Some [actors] like Scott Schofield and Marquise Vilson had encountered his story before, and a lot of them had read the biography written by Diane Middlebrook. They came into it knowing there have been records of Billy’s life told in history from the wrong point of view or telling the wrong narrative, and that was a responsibility that they felt they potentially had to help correct.

7R: I also loved that you included scenes of the actors just hanging out in between the auditions.

Chase Joynt: It was a strategy for us to open up as many opportunities for interaction and conversation as possible. Those rooms were actually running concurrently. We had a camera in the waiting room and a camera in the casting room. We understood that, as a process doc, the majority of process is happening before you walk through the door. So it was about trying to make sure we captured all those moments and not trying to control too much of what was happening in either space.

7R: How did you approach shooting those casting scenes?

Aisling Chin-Yee: This is the great thing about being two directors! We’re able to shoot simultaneously. We had two teams. Amos and I were in the audition room, where we had a classic [casting room] setup: you walk in, and there’s a director and a producer and whatever, and you run the lines with a reader.

Chase had the beautiful task of wrangling everybody in the waiting room, which was really great because it was such a beautiful meeting of a community in one space in a non-competitive sense. There were all these conversations happening. Chase was really curating how those discussions could go or asking questions that are better posed in a casual setting to a group of people to catch those back and forths. 

And there was just the beauty of watching an actor get ready. It’s a hard job, and it’s hard to walk into an audition. To be able to see all that process, it’s nothing to do with whether you’re trans or not, it’s just part of the [acting] process. It was something we always knew we wanted to do from the get go.

7R: In those casting scenes, you include yourselves as directors and writers on screen. I know a lot of documentary filmmakers have strong feelings about that. How did you come to that decision?

Chase Joynt: We’re invested in revealing the process behind a story for very strategic reasons. Part of the broader questions of our project is about who controlled Tipton’s story in the past? We need to be accountable to ourselves and the people on screen. 

There’s also an additional layer that reveals itself in our project, which is that there are trans people behind the camera and trans people in front of the camera telling a story about someone who’s no longer here. 

How do we make ourselves vulnerable in the context of the interview with Billy Jr., for example? Billy Jr. had come of age with [a certain version of] his dad’s story, and talking to cis-dominated media about his dad’s story. What happens when he starts talking to trans people about a potential new reading [of his father’s life]? It invites a new kind of vulnerability.

7R: There are so many layers to No Ordinary Man: the interviews on camera, the casting sessions, the scenes with Billy Jr., and the narrative of Billy’s life story. How did you approach putting all that together? What order did they come in?

Aisling Chin-Yee: We shot the casting and the interviews in chunks together mainly based on location. We shot Los Angeles in July 2019 and then we did the same setup in New York in August. 

Then, we went to Spokane for a few days with a much more pared down crew and also worked with some local crew there to spend time with Billy Jr.. We had to allow him, over a number of days, to tell his own story and his dad’s story and to get to know us. We shot with [trans rights activist] Jamison Green there, as well, who lives nearby. We wanted them to meet each other so we could cross these two worlds. 

Chase Joynt: Another thing we often thought out loud about in the edit was how to keep Billy in focus. One of the ways that happens is through the inclusion of his music and the audio tapes.

Bill Jr. stands by a CD player in his home.
Billy Jr. in No Ordinary Man. Image courtesy of TIFF.

7R: Aisling, you have experience in fiction filmmaking, as well as documentary. How does that fiction sensibility affect the way you approach a documentary project?

Chase Joynt: Aisling has such a clear focus and such killer instincts around image and colour and style and pacing. Especially with the pacing, because she is the director and editor and writer on the project, so much of that reveals itself on screen. 

I think we’re both really invested in the borders of documentary. We’re not interested in linear, chronological, talking-heads-style projects. We borrow from the tools of fiction in the telling of this story even while it sits more in the genre of nonfiction or documentary.

Aisling Chin-Yee: For me, it’s just you tell a story in the best way possible. Sometimes, that’s a fictionalised account, where you can recreate or create something, an emotion or feeling or circumstance, through fiction or stories. Sometimes, you tell the story with real people and their real experiences, and you don’t have to have that layer of change or adaptation for a narrative audience that is used to stories being told in one certain way.

7R: I so appreciated how creative No Ordinary Man is with telling Billy’s story. Was pushing against the standard rote formula of biographical documentary part of your initial conversations about this film?

Chase Joynt: Absolutely. We’re recording this interview for a transcript, but I want to note that Aisling and I are both nodding aggressively right now. (laughs) I think understanding that there was no moving image footage of Tipton was both a restriction and an opportunity for us to immediately start thinking creatively beyond the bounds of reenactment and other ways that biopics tend to be created.

Aisling Chin-Yee: The importance of his story isn’t just an account of who he met, where and when. It’s a much more internal and emotional journey for a lot of people involved in understanding his story. We wouldn’t be doing anybody any justice by just saying, “From what we know, he was here in 1943, and here in 1945.”

7R: How long was the editing process?

Aisling Chin-Yee: 10,000 years! (laughs) With breaks and a pandemic in between, it was about 10 months in total. 

7R: Did you do test screenings?

Aisling Chin-Yee: I really like to be in a room with people [during test screenings] so I can watch people’s reactions because it’s not always their articulated intellectual notes that are most useful]. It’s actually just seeing if someone is leaning in at a moment or checking their watch at another moment. That’s what I take the most value and information from. Chase knows that whenever I show something to him I say, “You have to do it with Zoom or FaceTime so I can watch your face!” 

We sent [the film] to a very select but diverse group of people whose opinions and ideas and experiences we value and trust to be able to comment on the film.

Chase Joynt: It was also a way for us to sense what the audience for a film like this could be. We have big goals! We want to turn toward a more generalised mainstream, whatever that means, and we want the project to hold very community-specific meaning in trans and gender-nonconforming community spaces. Our early test audiences needed to reflect that. What does this mean to you? What’s working? What’s not? What are things that we’re not seeing? And then taking all that back into the final stages of the edit.

7R: Do you know what the plans are for No Ordinary Man?

Aisling Chin-Yee: TIFF will be launching the fall festival circuit. It will exist in our laptops and houses! Then, we’ll see. Our main goal is to get it to audiences and communities as soon as possible. It will eventually play [on Canadian public television], but we’re also hoping for global exposure so the movie can be more widely seen across the world.

7R: What are you working on next?

Chase Joynt: I’m working on a feature film called Framing Agnes which is about never before seen case studies from trans history.

Aisling Chin-Yee: I’m getting onto projects I’ve been writing for and attached to for the last little while. I’ve taken a bit of a pause for this film [No Ordinary Man]. Now I’m going back into the world of fiction and narrative films and television.

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Natasha Kermani and Brea Grant on the horror of daily misogyny in Lucky

Director Natasha Kermani and writer-star Brea Grant discuss their slasher horror-comedy Lucky, a film that makes the horrific impact of daily microaggressions visible. The film is now screening on Shudder in Canada, US, UK, Australia, NZ, and Ireland. This is part of our coverage of the Fantasia Festival.

Natasha Kermani and Brea Grant in front of a still from their film Lucky. The image features text that says this is an interview for the Fantasia Film Fest.
Natasha Kermani and Brea Grant on exposing the horror of everyday misogyny in Lucky.

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What if you had a stalker who tried to kill you every night? And when you tell your husband, he responds, exasperated, that of course you do? That’s the premise of Natasha Kermani’s new film, Lucky, with a script by the film’s star, Brea Grant, which is equal parts funny, creepy, and wise.

When May (Brea Grant) is awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of someone breaking into her house, she wakes up her husband (Dhruv Uday Singh). When he tells her, with bored seriousness (and great deadpan from Singh) that, of course, it’s the man who breaks into their house every night to try to kill them, she’s not sure she heard him right — or that she’s even awake. Neither are we, and this moment was my first big laugh of the film, feeling equal parts extremely amused and absolutely terrified that someone would make light of something that horrifying. With a score that occasionally evokes the shower scene from Psycho, we’re primed to expect a straightforward slasher film, though the humour tips us off that there may be more going on beneath the surface.

As the slasher’s presence becomes a nightly ritual, May not only gets good at quickly murdering him herself, but it becomes rote. At the beginning of the film, May dutifully calls the police each night to report a crime. But when the body disappears each night, they offer little help, and start to treat her like she’s crazy. So eventually, she just sticks to fending him off. The ordeal of an ordinary woman fighting for her life nightly, only to end up covered in someone else’s blood, starts to feel routine. 

The indifference of the world to May’s struggle, and the fact that she can’t really tell anyone about it makes it feel all too real. Living under patriarchy can feel like death by a thousand papercuts, an extreme annoyance that wears you down but is invisible to everyone else. What Lucky does is take this up a notch, suggesting that facing misogyny isn’t just a minor annoyance, but a literal fight for your life (and sense of self) on a daily basis, for which there is no reward and no reprieve. It’s not coincidence, then, that May never actually removes her stalker’s mask until the very end, because he could be anyone. The problem with patriarchy is never just one bad egg; it’s systemic, and so is May’s struggle to survive in her own home. In the film’s final act, Grant opens the story up more, bringing in other women, other victims, and extending her metaphor to a problem that is much bigger than May’s individual struggle.

The horror of the slasher film is usually visceral. As Grant commented to me, what woman hasn’t been followed by a man who scared her? But with Lucky, Grant and Kermani do something different: by the third night, the suspense isn’t whether May will live another day, so much as whether she’ll eventually get burnt out. 

The stalker isn’t the thing that goes bump in the night; it’s the thing that takes up all her energy, when she should be or could be doing other things, like writing her next self-help book. It’s the thing that alienates her from her already problematic husband and his family. It’s the thing that makes survival a pain in the ass, which you can’t just accept and ignore, because you still have to keep fighting or you’ll die. And Grant and Kermani do a remarkable job of making the horror of microaggressions that kill visible.

When the film premiered online at the Fantasia Festival in August, I talked to Grant and Kermani via Zoom about how they teamed up, how they approached telling this particular story that is so familiar to so many women, and why casting comedians in a horror film was the right thing to do.

Seventh Row (7R): What was the genesis of Lucky? 

Brea Grant: It came from a personal experience that I had involving someone showing up to my house, and they say, “Write what you know!” (laughs) I was trying to grapple with my experience and dealing with the American court system. 

And then there was my experience of talking to other women about their experiences. It’s really rare to find a woman that doesn’t say, “I had a similar experience.” There’s very few women who will say, “I’ve never been followed down the street.” Every woman has a similar story. For me, it was the need to tell this story in both a personal and also a universal way.

7R: Natasha, how did you come on board as director?

Natasha Kermani: A producer sent me the script. I knew Brea socially, but we had never worked together, so this was the first time I was hearing her voice as a writer. I was initially drawn in by her way of bringing me into this very dark issue in a satirical, clever way. I was laughing while I was reading it! It was a dark chuckle, but I was laughing. 

Then there was a point when she moved into the third act, where the film really expands in scope and widens out. At that point, I put the script down, emailed her, and said, “Hey, I really want to do this.” I felt like, if I can come to this material and bring the audience on the same journey, and use this piece as a window to a larger conversation, I think we can do something really special and exciting.

7R: It’s fairly rare to have a writer-star in a film. How did that affect your collaboration?

Natasha Kermani: I had worked with a writer-star in short form capacity, so I wasn’t completely scared off by that. Brea herself is a filmmaker; we had a lot of transparency and honesty at the beginning of the process, to know that we were a duo going out into the world to do this thing. I know that’s not always the case, so I got lucky.

Brea Grant: No, I got lucky! (laughs) After Natasha and I worked on rewrites together, it was really important for me to just be an actor. I’ve worked with people who are actors but also writers and other kinds of collaborators. It works sometimes, and it doesn’t work sometimes. It was really important for me to take a step back and help her achieve her vision. With film in particular, it is collaborative, but you need that person with a singular vision or else your movie is going to feel fractured. It needed that very specific Natasha Kermani vision. 

7R: Did you rehearse, or did you feel like you’d already gotten that space to think about the film together in the writing process?

Natasha Kermani: On a movie this small, you’re fighting for every single piece of prep. We definitely tried to be really conscious with our casting, to have actors who had thoroughly read the script and who we could have thorough conversations with. We were able to talk through some scenes together, but we really didn’t have extensive rehearsals, which was really difficult. It was a really fast pre-production phase. 

The process of rewriting was really important for us because that was the draft that went out to the other actors, and then there were conversations happening with those actors on top of that draft that we [Kermani and Grant] had already workshopped through. So the script revisions were almost like a pre-workshop phase. 

Brea Grant: We met with a couple of actors and did some read throughs.

Natasha Kermani: For specific scenes.

Brea Grant: Yeah. That was helpful.

Natasha Kermani: That’s true. We read with Dhruv [Uday Singh], who plays Ted. We were able to work through some scenes together. And the character of Sarah. We did a few specific scene read throughs.

Brea Grant: It wasn’t like we got to sit around and work on them for hours, which would be the dream. On movies this size, it’s so unfortunate because you only have a certain amount of time. You have to hire actors who know what the hell they’re doing. It’s helpful because Natasha had a really specific vision, so we could just come in and achieve that. If she didn’t, it would have been a disaster.

7R: How did you think about developing the film’s aesthetic?

Natasha Kermani: The movie is sort of like The Twilight Zone. It’s a descent into a bizzaro version of our own world. 

I was really excited to work with a DP I’d worked with before, Julia Swain, and so a lot of my early conversations were with her, talking about lensing and lighting choices. We made a really early decision to go with] anamorphic [lenses], which sets the audience into a very cinematic world. Off the bat, we’re not trying to convey hyper-realism. We’re very much leaning into the fact that this is a movie and weird shit is going to go down. 

We leaned even more into it with our production designer. We had a lot of conversations about how the space is sort of adjusting itself over the course of the film. There are items in May’s house that are changing and shifting. I thought of it as Alice going through the looking glass. Every step she takes, and with every scene, we’re being propelled further into this nightmare reality. The movie really isn’t that dark — it’s really fun — but the aesthetic was a dark nightmare. 

When you read Brea’s script, the sense of claustrophobia and descent into an underworld parallel to our own world is really strong, and it really stuck with me. All of our decisions branched out of this descent into a bizarro world, even down to casting. 

Brea’s very funny, so I thought it would be interesting to look at comedic actors. There’s something about comedic actors. They just see things from a different angle. I thought it would throw the audience off even more.

Brea Grant: All of these comedic actors that Natasha cast have improv backgrounds. It’s such a great cast, and it works so well because horror and comedy are just two sides of the same coin when it comes to acting.

7R: I’ve definitely heard talk about horror and comedy being kind of similar as genres because they both offer a kind of release. But I’ve never thought about it from an acting perspective. How do you feel like these genres are different sides of the same coin?

Brea Grant: I think they’re all about timing. Comedy is about timing, really, and it’s the same with horror. It’s about the beats and understanding each beat. And there’s a heightened state in both of them. With drama, you’re going to play everything down here, but with horror and comedy, things start to get elevated really quickly. You need an actor who can go there. 

Natasha Kermani: And they’re both expressions of tragedy, right? They’re both expressions of very dark material and dark truths. I also felt, if we went too dramatic, we’d kill the movie. There’s some lines where, if you say it too heavy, the whole thing completely tanks. I was very aware of avoiding that.

We were cracking up in the edit, by the way! Some of the stuff that didn’t even make it into the edit was really very funny. That’s what drew me to Brea’s script. It’s a funny way in. You’re allowing people to giggle at the beginning of the movie, and by the end, you understand you’ve actually been watching something very serious the whole time.

7R: How did you manage tone both on set and in the edit? It’s both uproariously funny and really terrifying at the same time. 

Natasha Kermani: Honestly, Brea brought it. She’s the centre of the movie. I love movies that have a really singular primary character. My first film is also designed around a single actress. That’s really fun, because you really get to live in that person’s skin. 

What Brea as May was bringing to the table, the other actors and set were able to adjust to. There are definitely some sequences that are very serious and intense. Keep in mind, we shot this movie in 15 days, so the tone was, “Let’s get this shit in the can!”

Brea Grant: You did one take, and that was enough! 

I’m real goofy on set, too, because I’m just so happy to be there. Every time I’m in a movie, I’m just like, “Will this be the last time I get to be on a set?” So when I’m back, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m back! They haven’t knocked me off yet!” Because it was so much darkness [in Lucky], I felt it was good to have silly moments and be able to laugh on set.

Natasha Kermani: I come from crew, so while I did always have a focus on writing and directing, I was working a lot on the below-the-line side all through college and then out of college. So I’m always aware of the spirit of the crew and trying to make sure that people are engaged and understand what we’re trying to do. It’s very much about the people you hire, and the people they hire — making sure you hire people you trust and who are loyal. From there, the tone should be spread in good faith.

This was a small set and a small crew, and most people had read the script, which, by the way, is not normal. Usually, below the line, you don’t read the script. You show up and ask what you’re doing that day. I used to play a game when I worked on camera crew where we would make up the story that was happening [in the film]! 

Brea Grant: My favourite thing is to ask the sound team, a week in, what they think the movie’s about!

Natasha Kermani: Yes! It’s hilarious.

Brea Grant: They’ve gotten pretty close!

7R: I was actually going to ask about how you thought about the sound and the music in the film.

Natasha Kermani: We have an incredible composer who was very much out of our league. Jeremy Zuckerman is his name. I am so fucking thrilled that we got Jeremy! I came to him and said I really liked his avant garde stuff. I first heard his music because he did the soundtrack to the TV show Scream, which is beautiful and very melodic, with a full string ensemble. I told him we didn’t have the resources for that, and it’s also not what I’m interested in doing. 

I gave him a few cues. I knew I wanted to be very specific about the instruments that you hear, one of them being a female voice, and to have extended vocals, which is almost the sound that your voice makes when it’s still inside of your throat. It’s very much the sounds of choking and gurgling. He said, “Great, I have a vocalist.” Then, we pinned down the other [musical] voices we wanted in the film. I knew we wanted cello as one of the voices. 

There were different sounds for the man versus for May, and then those two sounds start to combine over the course of the film, until the third act, where we have the biggest expression of music, which is their two musical identities merging. He [Jeremy] was really into that, and he was really into the idea that I didn’t want the typical, ultra-melodic, John Williams or Ennio Morricone soundtrack. He was like, “Great, this is my opportunity to do something wacky.” 

It was a very fast, intense collaboration, as with everything on this film, but it was super important. I have a music background myself. We started before filming. 

It’s really important for it to have a thick, multi-layered sound design, especially as we move into the third act. In the third act, you want this really twisted sound. The house itself sounds different at the end of the movie versus the beginning.

Brea Grant as May, wiping blood off her face after a fight with her stalker.
Brea Grant in Lucky.

7R: Different in what sense?

Natasha Kermani: At the beginning, it’s really realistic. When you’re inside the house, you hear traffic outside. You hear everything happening in the house. At the end of the film, it’s really just her breathing, ambient sound, and specific cues of him [her stalker] coming in. 

The whole movie is the journey from the beginning to the end, which is obvious to say, but it’s not what a lot of movies are about. We’re trying to take us from the reality May is living in at the beginning to this twisted reality at the end. The music develops, but also the sound design is going in almost the opposite direction, where we’re stripping it down. 

The [scene in the] parking garage is the most important scene to me. There’s a lot of wacky stuff in there. When she’s running, there’s actually some sounds of earthquakes happening. There’s all sorts of layers in there. That is the peak of the sound. If you look at the sound designer’s file, that’s where [the highest number of sound layers are], and then when the movie ends, it gets very stripped down until at the very end, literally all there is is the music and her breathing. That’s it. It’s just May and the man.

7R: The movie begins with the idea of being stalked, but the metaphor expands by the end to be about May fighting her stalker every night and killing him, only for him to come back. It’s this traumatic thing, but it becomes rote. And then she discovers that lots of other women are going through the same thing, and she can’t help them because she’s trying to save herself. That works as a metaphor for so many other things, for misogyny and patriarchy, in general. How did you think about what those layers were?

Natasha Kermani: One thing I will say is I really like that May is not perfect, which I think is also what you’re saying, that you become numbed by your experience, whether it is your experience of gaslighting or actual external threat on various scales. We can all relate to the banality of abuse and how it changes who you are as a person. That’s very dark. She makes some not-so-great decisions. I know Brea was interested in having her be a self help author, which I think is also quite funny but quite dark: she’s literally making money off of telling people how to help themselves, and she’s almost incapable of doing it for herself.

Brea Grant: I wrote the whole script, and I couldn’t quite figure out who May was. I did it backwards, where I gave her that job and realised how that affected her. 

I do have an interest in the self help world. I love a self help book. (laughs) I find them fascinating on so many levels, but I’m also really interested in the people who choose to write them. You’re telling people how to improve their lives. 

It always makes me wonder about them and how perfect or imperfect their lives are, because nobody’s perfect. Nobody is able to live by their own structured rules. I guarantee they’re not all doing the things they’re advocating that we all do. 

I have an interest in perfection, in general: people who present ideas of perfection and how difficult it is to live those out. What happens if you’re a person who is so structured and focused on perfection that you end up being somebody that you don’t want to be?

7R: What was the editing process like, given that timing was so important on this film?

Natasha Kermani: I worked with an editor named Chris Willett, who’s great. We worked on a short film together so there was a shorthand there. He has a fair amount of experience with comedic stuff so he and I wanted to respect the timing of the actors on set. It was a fast turnaround, again, because we shot the movie so fast. There’s only a few ways to put it together. It was really just about fine-tuning the action sequences and the more suspenseful parts. We worked closely for several months. 

All temp music was from our actual composer, Jeremy. It was a real shortcut to be able to use music from his musical vernacular. There’s a lot of music in the movie. I don’t think we use it as a crutch, but it’s part of the film’s DNA. 

We did an interesting and helpful test screening. As you might imagine, there was a real gender divide. It was fascinating. The men really liked it, too, but the women really got it and were laughing. Men were being very literal about it and asking what happened to the husband. Women got on board with the metaphor within the first few minutes of the movie. That was really helpful because we were able to nudge the film a little bit in the direction of accessibility.

7R: Brea, were you involved at all with the editing?

Brea Grant: No.

Natasha Kermani: She was editing her own movie!

Brea Grant: Yeah, I was. Look, there’s enough Brea Grant in this movie! (laughs) I was in the first movie I directed. As much as I like to think I’m objective, it was very hard for me to be objective, so I saw cuts along the way, but generally my notes were, “You’re doing great!” 

When you’re making a movie on this budget, I don’t think you should have to conform to everyone else’s ideas. You shouldn’t have five producers or your writer-producer-actor giving you notes the whole time, because Natasha is making this movie, getting paid less than what she can survive on for a month, and she works on the movie for a fucking year. You have to put your heart and soul into it.

I believe in a singular vision when it comes to filmmaking, and I think that, at the very least, an indie director should get to have final say on what they’re doing because they put so much work into it for so little reward.

Natasha Kermani: And that’s what we go to independent films for, right? To not have the super filtered-down too-many-cooks approach. We want to see a single chef.

Brea Grant: That’s how you end up with these weirdo crazy movies that we love!

Lucky is now available to stream in Canada, US, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand on Shudder .

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Exam is the year’s most horrifically tense short

Iranian writer-director Sonia K. Hadad discusses crafting her nail-biting short film Exam, starring captivating up-and-comer Sadaf Asghari.

An still from the short film Exam, next to the film's director Sonia K. Hadad. The image bears the text: Interview.
Sonia K. Hadad’s Exam is the year’s most horrifically tense short.

I first saw Sonia K. Hadad’s Iranian short film Exam in the cinema (remember those) in January, at the London Short Film Festival, where it captivated the entire room. There were audible gasps throughout this 15-minute wonder, as Hadad expertly ramped up the tension in the film to a breaking point. The film has won accolades at festivals across the globe, from Best Live Action Short at AFI Fest to Best Actress in a Short Film for Sadaf Asghari at Sundance. 

While Exam is essentially a realist drama, it’s so nail-bitingly tense that it feels more like a horrific thriller — it even screened at the horror-centric Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, another festival I attended early in the year. Exam follows a teenage girl (the absorbing Asghari), whom we meet hurriedly cramming in some last-minute revision at the breakfast table, where her dad insists she deliver a packet of cocaine that morning. By the way she reacts — with casual annoyance as if he’s asked her to do the dishes — we can infer shepherding drugs to and fro is commonplace in her life. Things get complicated when the client doesn’t arrive, meaning she arrives at school with the drugs still in her bag.

“The story of Exam is a combination of my own personal experiences during high school and a true story that I heard from one of my friends,” Sonia K. Hadad explained to me. Hadad co-wrote the film with filmmaker Farnoosh Samadi. Hadad is an Iranian writer-director who moved to the US in 2013 for her education, which is where she began making short films, producing, and also editing TV series and shorts. Exam, her third short, is the work of an exciting emerging talent with a knack for precise editing and sound design that raises the heart rate of her rapt audience.

She’s also a brilliant director of actors, which is likely partly due to the fact that she trained as a theatre actor. “I believe that it had a significant impact,” she told me. “I used to work with theatre directors so I’m used to their style of working with actors. Theatre rehearsals take time. Personally, I prefer to work in that style. You get closer to the character.” Hadad’s lead actress, Sadaf Asghari, is a star on the rise in her own right (she was the lead of this year’s Sundance World Dramatic Prize winner, Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness). “She’s super smart,” Hadad gushed. “She doesn’t come from a professional acting background, but she is a genius. She’s not an actress you have to train or talk with a lot. She just got it right away.”

A still from the short film Exam, in which lead actress Sadaf Asghari looks at herself in a school bathroom mirror.
Sadaf Asghari in the bathroom scene of Exam.

The centrepiece of Exam is a scene in a classroom: after Asghari’s character has set her pen down at the end of the exam, relieved that it’s over, the principal of the school arrives for a routine bag check. The tension rises as the principal gets closer and closer to our heroine, who tries and continually fails to think of a viable hiding place for the cocaine. 

I asked Hadad how she built the sequence, expecting to hear that it was through intensive conversations with the DP, but I was surprised to hear that her editor was a primary collaborator during pre-production. “Before the shoot, I talked a lot with my editor, which helped me in terms of the découpage. I pre-découpaged all the scenes and shots a week before the shoot. It changed just a little [in the edit] but not a lot.” 

This unconventional approach saved time in the edit, which took about 14 days to complete in full. Hadad explained that it took “maybe four or five days to make the first rough cut. It took another week to work on the details.” Those “details” actually included settling on an ending for the film, since Hadad had actually shot two possible versions. “We had two endings: one mine, and one my co-writer’s. We were always arguing for the ending during the editing. I shot the other ending, but during the editing, I decided that I like mine more, which is more open.” Showing the rough cut to her co-writer and two friends really helped her settle on the final version of the film.

The final masterstroke of the film’s editing is its sound design, which Hadad was very specific about, having written sounds into the original script. “I believe that some movies need music and some don’t,” she explained. “For my film, I was thinking that the tension of the film is enough. But I was thinking about the sound design.” She went into some detail about the sounds in the film’s final scene, which build up like a cacophony inside the main character’s head as she walks toward the camera. “There are sounds of construction going on around the school, banging and stuff like that. That was a real sound recorded by the mixer on set. I mixed this sound with her [Asghari’s] breathing. It was also mixed with the sound of the bell at school and students shouting at each other.”

Another sound highlight occurs at the film’s tensest moment, at the end of the classroom scene when the protagonist’s stress and fear is at its most unbearable: Hadad subtly augments the suspense of this moment with a simple, tinny ringing sound that rises in pitch. She explained the choice to me: “It was my own experience that whenever I’m stressed out, and my heart is beating really fast, I feel that I cannot hear anything anymore. It rarely happens because it needs a lot of tension to make you feel like that. I wanted to add this feeling to that moment when she’s [the main character is] like ‘Oh, fuck.’ The rate of stress goes higher and higher, and she cannot hear anything but that sound of thoughts in her head.”

When I asked Hadad what she learned from making Exam that she will take with her to future projects, she stressed the importance of collaboration. “I realised I should work with people I really like. Sometimes, you want to work with a person who is really good and famous and professional, but you can’t communicate with them. You don’t have any chemistry. This time, I tried my best to choose a cast and crew that I really liked and can communicate with. It really worked out. For the next project, I’m going to do the same. Film production is serious: you can’t go back and shoot it again. It’s a lot of money.”

So what are those next projects? “I’m working on my next short. I’ve finished the script, but I’m not sure about a date of the shoot because of the pandemic. It’s really risky. So I’m waiting to see what I can do, how I can gather people. Then I’m working on my [first] feature film’s plot, which I’m planning to shoot hopefully next spring.” 

Exam will be screening soon at Odense International Film Festival on August 25th at 12 pm, August 26th at 3:30 pm, August 27th at 5 pm and August 28th at 8:45 pm.

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Kris Rey on her comedy of mid-30s malaise, I Used to Go Here

Writer-director Kris Rey on her new comedy, I Used to Go Here, about a writer who returns to her alma mater for a few days of self-discovery.

An image of Kris Rey superimposed over a still from her film, I Used to Go Here, featuring Gillian Jacobs. The image has the text, Interview, over it.
Gillian Jacobs (left) stars in I Used to Go Here, the new film directed by Kris Rey (right)

Between Unexpected (2015) and I Used to Go Here (2020), writer-director Kris Rey has quickly distinguished herself as one of our smartest chroniclers of the female experience — especially when it comes to stories of women in their 30s who don’t fit into conventional stereotypes. Her films are quiet, naturalistic comedies filled with good people struggling with their stage of life, making visible an often invisible niche of female life. 

The protagonists in both films are amidst an identity crisis, brought on by opposing reasons: Unexpected follows a woman, Samantha (Cobie Smulders), in her 30s who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant; I Used to Go Here is the story of a woman, Kate (Gillian Jacobs), in her 30s who isn’t pregnant or married when all of her friends are both. Both women feel out of step with the men and women their age. As Rey told me of being pregnant and Unexpected, “When I was going through it, emotionally, I did feel really isolated and alone. My husband was supportive but didn’t understand. And I haven’t seen a movie that deals with that before, so I really wanted to [make one].”

In I Used to Go Here, the single Kate is constantly encountering men her age who are in relationships yet still hitting on her, who have outdated, misogynistic ways of relating to women. Consequently, both Samantha and Kate end up striking up friendships with people 10-15 years younger than them: Samantha with her star high school student, and Kate with some of the students at her alma mater.

I Used to Go Here begins just as Kate has published her first novel but had her press tour canceled. So when she gets an unexpected invitation to give a reading at her alma mater in Carbondale, Illinois, from David (Jemaine Clement), a professor she used to crush on, she jumps at the chance. She arrives thinking she’ll be spending time bonding with Dave, but when she discovers he’s married, she ends up left to her own devices.

The bed and breakfast that the university is putting her up in happens to be across the street from the house she used to live in as a student, one she dubbed the “Writers’ Retreat” because it was filled with creative writing majors. She finds herself wandering over there out of nostalgia, and unexpectedly befriending the three boys who now live there: Animal (Forrest Goodluck), Hugo (Josh Wiggins), and Tall Brandon (Brandon Daley).

Over the course of the few days that Kate spends in Carbondale, she regresses by hanging out with twentysomethings, missing the days when her future was wide open. But she learns from them, too. The boys of today’s Writers’ Retreat are, in many ways, more mature and enlightened than the men Kate’s age, and she gets pieces of herself back — a naivety and optimism — by hanging out with them.

The young cast is peppered with a who’s who of talented emerging actors, including Wiggins who wowed us in Giant Little Ones and Goodluck who did the same in The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Blood Quantum. Khloe Janel, who plays Animal’s girlfriend, is so stunningly good — mature, funny, and totally charismatic — that I hope we’ll see more of her in the future.

Over Zoom, I spoke with writer-director Kris Rey about making a quiet comedy that is naturalistic even when it’s broad, creating a realistic world for her characters to inhabit, the hope to glean from the next generation, and the horrors of editing.

Gillian Jacobs as Kate poses for a photograph in a lineup of pregnant women. She holds her book, Seasons Passed, where her baby bump would be and struggles to smile. Still from I Used to Go Here directed by Kris Rey.
Gillian Jacobs (left) stars in the film I Used to Go Here directed by Kris Rey

Seventh Row (7R): The film depicts a stage of life that I’ve rarely seen on film before: she’s past 30, but not a mother or married while all of her friends are both. How did you decide to tell a story about someone who is not married, not pregnant, who feels a bit out of step with her friends?

Kris Rey: It’s about someone in their mid-30s. I started writing the movie when I was in my mid-30s. It’s not that weird that I decided to write something about someone in the stage of life I was in — even though I had checked those domestic boxes. At the time, I was married, had a kid, and was pregnant with my second. But you’re right that it rarely happens, especially about women.

My inspiration came from my experience visiting universities for my last movie. Being a professor, your role is really regimented, especially these days. I’m not allowed to go drink with my students although I think lots of them would love for me to be able to do that. It’s such a clear rule that I haven’t had that experience as a professor.

But because of the nature of the film industry, working on crews, your coworkers become people, in their late-20s, that you are going out drinking with, relating to, and becoming friends with. It was really surprising to me when I found out that they were so young and when I realised I was so much older than them. I do have experience with that dynamic and still do. I have many friends that are 10-15 years younger than me that I consider equals, but I realise that there is a difference there.

Kate (Gillian Jacobs) stares longingly at her former professor, David (Jemaine Clement), in I Used To Go Here, the new film from Kris Rey
Kate (Gillian Jacobs) talks to her former professor, David (Jemaine Clement), in I Used To Go Here, the new film from Kris Rey

7R: So many of the men that Kate interacts with in the movie are these creepy men who are in relationships but still flirting with her. 

Kris Rey: The characters she has those experiences with are David [Jemaine Clement], who is older than her, and Bradley Cooper [her former classmate, played by Jorma Taccone of Booth Jonathan fame], who is her age. That was intentional. I personally think that the way we are going culturally, in terms of gender, is really very positive. So the relationships she has with the students who are younger, with younger men, are really great. You get the sense that especially Animal, played by Forrest Goodluck, and his relationship with Emma, definitely feels the healthiest of any relationship that you see. The way that they interact with each other, and the way that Kate interacts with them, feels so positive. 

That is the way that I view this generation of Zoomers. I really do think they think about it in the right way. They’re questioning all that and being very cautious. It’s happening very naturally and becoming a part of the way they relate. I’m noticing that with my own interactions with people that age. I think that’s really positive. That separation was intentional.

7R: Just because she’s hanging out with younger people, it’s not necessarily regressive. It’s partly that she’s nostalgic, but also some of these younger men are more mature than the people her age. 

Kris Rey: Definitely. I think it’s both. You can’t really just hang out with 21-year-olds your whole life, but I think you can learn a lot and take some of that with you. Some of that is ignorance and naiveté. And some of it is more of a purity that Kate has lost.

Dressed in a red orientation week t-shirt, Gillian Jacobs stars as Kate, leading a band of college students — Left to right: Josh Wiggins, Gillian Jacobs, Khloe Janel, and Forrest Goodluck — in I Used to Go Here from director Kris Rey
Left to right: Josh Wiggins, Gillian Jacobs, Khloe Janel, and Forrest Goodluck star in I Used to Go Here from director Kris Rey

7R: How do you approach directing actors, especially given you’re working with such a great ensemble?

Kris Rey: My main approach is casting: finding people that are able to bring these very human, grounded characteristics to their characters. I’m always looking for naturalism, even in the broader moments. I’m looking for subtle performances. And I’m finding that first in casting and looking for people that can bring that subtlety without it necessarily having to be quiet or small. I was very lucky to be able to cast these actors that bring that so well through their performances.

I actually didn’t have any time to rehearse. We just talked about the script. We would rehearse on the day before we shot. Sometimes, we would rehearse a scene, block it out, and then we would take the script, sit down with the actors, and shift the dialogue to make it better. Gillian [Jacobs] and I did that a few times with different scenes, and she was, in particular, very additive to the script.

7R: How did you work with your cinematographer, especially as it pertains to capturing performances?

Kris Rey: My cinematographer on this film, Nate Hurtsellers, had shot a film in Chicago called Saint Frances, which was a low-budget indie that was very intimate. I thought the performances were so good [in Saint Frances] and very naturalistically captured. That was the biggest reason why I wanted to work with Nate. 

We developed a shorthand on set because we had prepped so much beforehand. We were able to watch a lot of films together, talk about what we like, and what we didn’t like, and create a look ahead of time that we kept referring back to during production.

We really wanted to work with natural light as much as possible, and when we couldn’t, we wanted to emulate natural light. One of the things we really looked for in the nighttime scenes was streets that used incandescent lights rather than LED lights. He was very passionate about this, much to the chagrin of my locations manager and producer. LED lights, which are more modern lights, emit a blue hue. Incandescent lights, which are older, emit an orange hue. We really wanted the look of the orange hue because it felt more small town and nostalgic and warm. Because this movie also takes place in the summer, warmth was a really big part of what we were going for.

In this scene, Gillian's character, Kate, is staring up at Hugo, played by Josh Wiggins.
Gillian Jacobs and Josh Wiggins star in I Used To Go Here from writer-director Kris Rey

7R: How did you scout for locations and how did you approach designing the writers’ retreat where the boys live?

Kris Rey: We went on a trip to Carbondale together with my production designer. We all worked together to try to emulate the feeling of a small town, although 95% of the film was shot in Chicago. Even the street with the bed and breakfast and the Writers’ Retreat, which looks so small town, we found on the west side of Chicago. We did our very best to make it look like more of a remote college town than a big urban metropolis. 

My production designer, Megan Hovany, just killed it. We unfortunately weren’t able to rifle through any college houses while we were in Carbondale. But we searched the internet for art photographers who had done documentary photos that captured young adults, teenagers, and people in their early twenties: their bedrooms and the inside of their homes. 

We used a lot of my own memories and nostalgia. And Megan had her own experiences from her college. She brought in photos of what she and her roommates had decorated with. 

7R: How did you approach designing the costumes? Modern day costume designs that aren’t high fashion tend to be so underappreciated, but I loved how realistic and lived in the costumes in the film are.

Kris Rey: With our costume designer, Kate Grube, it was really similar. Everybody says this, and it’s always true, but filmmaking is a collaboration. I don’t think that these people get enough credit for how much they bring to what a movie ends up being and how it ends up feeling. It’s an amalgamation of everyone’s best efforts. 

Like Megan, our production designer, our costume designer, Kate, was researching photos of what kids are wearing. We wanted it to feel nostalgic, but we also wanted it to feel real to 2019 when we made it. She was looking at what young people are wearing, not in fashion magazines but in documentary photos and in people’s instagram accounts. She was walking down the street and visiting colleges to see what is the style.

We wanted to acknowledge that these students were not going to school in Manhattan. They were going to school in a small town in southern Illinois. They look cool; they’re artsy; they’re creative writing majors. But they’re also not wearing the latest fashions. It was a mix. And she was very careful to make everyone’s style unique to them, and did a really great job.

Not only did she collaborate with me, but she collaborated with the individual actors. She emailed Jemaine Clement ahead of time to say what she was thinking he would wear, which was a western vibe, something that was very popular in the early 2000s — how it was cool for guys to wear a western shirt with snaps for a while. She emailed him that idea, and he wrote back and said, “I’ve done that before. I’ve done that in Flight of the Concords and in other stuff.” So they scrapped it. They came up with a new look together, and then they’d bring it to me, and I would approve.

She did an incredible job.  I feel like those people and their work don’t get talked about enough — not just in isolation of what they’ve done but how it relates to what a movie looks like.

7R: What is the editing process like?

Kris Rey: The editing process is so long and stressful, and with this movie, in particular, I felt so anxious all the time. There is nothing worse than watching the very first assembly of the film you’ve just made. It looks like such a piece of shit. You can’t believe you made something so bad. I felt like that on my last film, and I felt like that big time on this film. 

When I watched the first assembly, I got so depressed. I was sure I had made a bad movie. I called people and said, “The movie sucks. I’m really sorry. I fucked it up.” All my friends were like, “Kris, this happens all the time.” And I was like, “I know. But this time it’s real. I really fucked it up.”

Editing takes so long. It takes much longer than production. Production lasts about four weeks. Editing lasted about 12 or 16 weeks. We wrapped the movie at the end of August of last year, and we were editing up until February. We were doing the post-production, with VFX and music, up until March, up until we were supposed to be premiering at SXSW. It just takes so long to get it right. That’s the case with every filmmaker that I know and every project that they do. 

So much changes [in the edit], and you’re able to influence the trajectory of the story and the arc. Again, editors just don’t get enough credit. My editor, Zach Clark, is incredible. I also worked with Daniel Johnson who is amazing and helped do all the finishing touches on the movie. There’s also the sound designer and the colour. There’s just so much that goes into making a movie good.

The music was a real struggle for me throughout. I finally landed on something that I love and that I’m really proud of. There are also scenes that we did reshoots of. 

I could probably point to almost every moment of the film and take you through how it changed and what the process was from the time I wrote it to what you’re seeing on the screen.

READ: Kris Rey on her female-driven pregnancy film, Unexpected >>

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