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Merawi Gerima’s Residue is an ‘archive of a community’ facing gentrification

Merawi Gerima’s directorial debut Residue, which ARRAY Now released on Netflix last Friday, is an impassioned ode to a rapidly gentrifying Washington D.C..

A still of JaCari Dye, who plays young Jay, hiding behind a car in Residue. In front of this still is a headshot of director Merawi Gerima. The text on the image states that this is an interview.
Merawi Gerima’s Residue is an ‘archive of a community’ facing gentrification. Image courtesy of ARRAY Releasing.

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Merawi Gerima comes from a lineage of pioneering Black filmmakers: his parents are Haile Gerima (Bush Mama) and Shirikiana Aina (Brick by Brick), whose films Gerima says he “draw[s] from heavily.” Like his parents, Gerima is unafraid to tell stories about Black life in America that don’t compromise on anger. On a micro level, his first feature, Residue, is about gentrification in Washington D.C., but in the macro, it views gentrification as a symptom of a larger problem: the racial violence, both physical and microaggressions, that pervades America.

Residue is unmistakably semi-autobiographical: it follows filmmaker Jay (Obinna Nwachukwu), who returns to his home of Q Street in D.C. after some time away at film school, only to find the place unrecognisable. “It made so much sense to just let it be what it was and go as meta as we possibly can, to make it literally about my life,” explained Gerima, who shot on the actual Q Street where he grew up. Although Nwachukwu is a professional actor playing a part, the film is populated with real people. In Gerima’s words, “Everyone from my life is in the film, either behind the camera or in front of the camera.”

The film draws a line between various forms of racial oppression. The narrative of Residue is loose; the film follows Jay as he visits old haunts and reunites with old friends, but finds that neither are as they used to be. The places Jay used to know are no longer there because of gentrification, just as the people he used to know are gone because they were incarcerated or murdered by the police. These two different assaults on Black life are symptomatic of the same problem — racism — and they have the same effect of warping Q Street beyond recognition.

The sensory beauty of Residue shines in flashback scenes to Jay’s childhood, which reflect Jay’s fond memories of the Q Street he once knew. Gerima plays with visual patterns and grains to evoke the hazy texture of memory. He shoots these flashbacks on 8mm film and superimposes a swirling, circular effect in post that has the effect of keeping one point of the image in focus while blurring the rest, like a memory Jay is straining to remember. The sound in these flashbacks is so vivid, too, and distinctly different from the sound of modern day Q Street, which is clogged with grating construction noises.

Gerima told me, “The film is an archive of the community that I want to exist as an actual archive” — through a fictionalised story, he’s created a document of Q Street that captures it before it changes even more. In a Zoom interview from Venice, where the film showed in the Venice Days programme, Gerima noted, “I’m in Venice right now, seeing  1000s of years of the Roman Empire’s history everywhere you turn. Black people don’t have that.” In the absence of architectural monuments to Black history, Residue is deeply attuned to the small and personal ways Black people archive their own history, from old chairs to letters to the family photos Jay’s parents project onto the wall. Residue itself is one such artifact.

I spoke to Gerima over Zoom just after he returned home from Venice, where the film received a Special Mention in the Venice Days section. Ava DuVernay’s distribution company, ARRAY Now, released the film internationally on Netflix last Friday, as well as in select U.S. theatres.

JaCari Dye, who plays young Jay, and director Merawi Gerima sit on the front porch of a house together.
Merawi Gerima (right) working with JaCari Dye (left), who plays young Jay, on the set of Residue. Image courtesy of ARRAY Releasing.

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

Merawi Gerima: As I got older, I started hearing bad news about the folks I’d grown up with, some of my best friends. That was always swirling around in my head. In 2016, I went back to D.C. after about a year away. Seeing the way everything had changed so much put me in revenge mode, wanting to write a script that dug into everything I hated about what was going on. At a certain point, that script merged with this initial idea of me looking for my friends.

7R: When did the meta-textual element of the main character being a filmmaker come in?

Merawi Gerima: I was in D.C., and we had pretty much already started filming. Up to that point, it still hadn’t been decided that Jay was a filmmaker, because I had been trying really hard to make sure I changed people’s names and certain locations; I didn’t want it to be 100% [autobiographical]. I felt like making him a filmmaker would, at that point, [make the autobiography] official. 

Actually, me and my cinematographer, Mark Jeevaratnam, were talking about the fact that we were shooting in my neighbourhood, and everyone from my life is in the film either behind the camera or in front of the camera. It made so much sense to just let it be what it was and go as meta as we possibly can, to make it literally about my life.

7R: I’m curious what your script looks like on the page, given Residue is so much about sensory elements, both visual and aural, and also because there’s an element of documentary in how you shot it. How much of the final film was written in the script, and how much was found on set or in the edit?

Merawi Gerima: We shot over two summers, in 2017 and again in 2018. In between, I was trying to submit to the Sundance [Screenwriters Lab], so I went back and changed the script to what we shot. That says a lot: what we shot was so different from the original script, which was just a collection of memories loosely tied together. Only in the shooting of it did we start to bring in a lot more narrative logic. 

[During the shoot,] we weren’t locked down by a budget or a perfected script. It was very loose, 100% outside of what they teach at film school. Any investor or producer would be hard pressed to believe in such a script.

7R: What led you to shooting over two summers with such a big break in between?

Merawi Gerima: We thought we had it the first summer. We shot a lot over 14 days, almost killed ourselves trying to get this thing done. I went back to school to finish my second year. We shot the first draft of the script, but it was so incomplete. It became clear very quickly that there was no ending, and many other things were missing. 

For example, the scene where we see Mike (Derron Scott) in his last moments, that wasn’t there. It’s something we shot the second summer. I didn’t shoot it originally, because I try not to get too bogged down in graphic details about how people died and things like that. But it felt important [to show so the viewer could] make sense of his mother’s reactions. Things like that. It was basically a pickup shoot.

7R: I read an interview where you said that “the process of filming Residue was a process of documentary.” How did you approach mixing documentary and fiction elements?

Merawi Gerima: We didn’t set out in such a clear way to say this film would be like a documentary, but we had certain things that we wanted to make sure we captured. For example, on the first day of shooting in my neighbourhood, I told my cinematographer, Mark, “If we’re rolling, and you see a white person, film them.” That led to this increasing list of rules we started holding ourselves to forf what we wanted to document of what was happening around us in that moment. That allowed us to not be bogged down in shooting exactly what was written [in the script]. We wanted to make sure the script was reacting to our reality, the same way we want our actors to react to it. 

There would be times when Obinna Nwachukwu, who plays Jay, would be in a scene, and I would audibly, off camera, be like, “Keep that dude who’s delivering pizzas to that house, and just fold it in.” So I’d get him [Nwachukwu] and Mark in on [treating the real person as part of the scene]. 

That’s how we got [one of the first scenes in the film, in which Jay arrives back on Q Street and a white neighbour tells him to turn down his car radio]. If you look closely, when you see the guy say, “Turn down the music,” that’s our actor. Then, he leaves, and the camera goes to Jay, [when you hear offscreen] the guy say, “Have a nice day.” 

That’s actually a real person, a delivery guy, who happened to be there [whose voice we captured]. I wouldn’t have been able to come up with that. It worked in the edit. We didn’t know we would use these things but they worked.

7R: What were the other rules you and your cinematographer, Mark Jeevaratnam, set for yourself for what to capture?

Merawi Gerima: Any types of construction, anything being demolished. A lot of the B-roll is stuff like bricks falling or guys hammering on the building that he [Jay] and his girlfriend go to. That was really just Mark getting those shots without me telling him to, because we had agreed on these things. There’s many that didn’t make it into the film, but for example, when Jay tries again to find out where Demetrius is, and the two guys don’t tell him, in the distance you can see a crane on a house. That was actually happening. 

The hole in the ground in that massive construction site, we found that accidentally. Me and my sister were driving on Q Street. We went back to what used to be the alleyway, and there was this massive hole in the ground, and I was like, there’s no way we’re not filming that. Me and Mark sat down to design these shots around it.

Obinna Nwachukwu as Jay in Residue, looking toward screen right in a darkened room.
Obinna Nwachukwu as Jay in Residue. Image courtesy of ARRAY Releasing.

7R: Was it a challenge to create your lead character, Jay, when he’s so close to you personally? And did the character change much when you cast Obinna Nwachukwu?

Merawi Gerima: It was a challenge. It’s difficult to breathe independent life into a character, to make him walk and talk differently from yourself. I don’t think I accomplished it. Trying to separate him from myself caused so much trouble, so when I allowed him to just be me, that’s when things started to click into place. It’s so contrary to the instinct of the artist which is to hide yourself and not show that it’s about you. Once Obi took it over, that actually became easy. It became easier to see him as separate and allow him to do things I wouldn’t do or say things I wouldn’t say. It became a really interesting blend.

7R: What kind of conversations did you have with your cinematographer in pre-production about what the aesthetic of Residue would be?

Merawi Gerima: It’s important to say that Mark came on maybe two or three days before we started filming. We didn’t have the pre-production time you’d hope. I didn’t know him before he came to D.C. that summer. My family has a bookstore in D.C., and one of the cinematographers he looks up to was a student of my dad’s at Howard University, Bradford Young (Arrival, Selma, Pariah). 

Bradford Young is always talking about my dad, [Haile Gerima,] so Mark, listening to Brad, was like “Well shit, I heard he has a cafe in D.C., maybe I’ll go get some coffee there.” He ran into my dad, and my dad welcomed him in, because he’s like that. [My dad] also mentioned, “My son is about to shoot a film,” and he introduced us. 

At the time, I had another cinematographer lined up and so Mark was just helping out where he could. But at a certain point, Mark stepped into the role, and with three days to go, we flew him from Atlanta back to D.C. to shoot the film. We had one night of scouting.

We were going to shoot on this Nikon D500, a DSLR [a type of camera that is more typically used for still photography than film], that I had. But he was like, “I think I can get us an Arri Alexa [an industry standard digital film camera] if I call in a favour.” It wasn’t an easy decision because I thought it would bring more drama than it was worth, and it was important to me to break some rules and shoot on this DSLR. But he said he could make it happen and that the production value was worth it. So he drove to New Jersey on our second night, and the next morning, drove it [the Alexa] back for filming. 

We had very little time. I gave him my references: photos, songs. The prep was very brief. If you track what shots happened at what stage of production, you’d see them getting better and better, to the point when, the second summer, we were synced up.

7R: What references did you give him?

Merawi Gerima: I had a lot of archival photos from Washington D.C. in the ‘90s, a bit of ‘80s. Photos of families, picnics, a lot of kids, fire hydrants, people on the street. A lot of Black kids. There were other things sprinkled in, a lot of police, photos you don’t like to see. Things that harken back to this era of the war on drugs, brothers being lined up on the street. I’ve witnessed it myself, images of five, six, seven brothers all lined up on the street. We were trying to [replicate that] with one of the shots in a dream sequence.

7R: So you took more inspiration from real life images than from film?

Merawi Gerima: We didn’t have time to really talk about film references, although I think it’s something that would have helped us out a lot, too. He [Mark] wasn’t that familiar with my parents’ films which I draw from heavily. After we filmed, he started watching those films and said, “I had no idea the kind of vocabulary you were working from.” And you could tell: sometimes, I’d tell him to do something, and he’d do it, but it wouldn’t necessarily make too much sense to him.

7R: You have a really interesting way of shooting flashbacks in the film, with this swirling circular pattern on the lens. How did you think about visually representing memory in the film?

Merawi Gerima: The film is really like his [Jay’s] journey of trying to access his memories. At the beginning, they’re hard to access, [so shots in the flashback scenes are altered with] this kind of circular blur. Mostly, it’s in the centre, but sometimes, it’s focused on different parts of the frame, bits he can remember. [As the film progresses,] everything becomes more and more clear until everything floods back. It was the same with me: trying to remember certain memories, you can get the gist of it, but sometimes, you can’t even remember what your best friends looked like.

JaCari Dye as young Jay in Residue, looking into the camera.
JaCari Dye as young Jay in Residue’s flashbacks. Image courtesy of ARRAY Releasing.

7R: How did you create that visual effect?

Merawi Gerima: I edited the whole film in Davinci Resolve, and they have really cool blurs. I was experimenting with those. That was the main tool I had. 

The really cool thing is [the blur effect] reacts differently to 8mm footage than it does to digital footage. It creates this amazing swirl, like that one shot of the kid shooting a firecracker, the effect is just a blur, but the movement of the 8mm grain [working with the blur effect] creates this amazing image. 

You get the same thing, too, when you push in heavily on digital footage. It’s harder to do on the Alexa footage [because it’s such a high resolution], but on cell phone footage or DSLR footage, if you zoom in on a small section of a larger shot, the digital grain itself starts to do something similar, especially if the shot itself is moving a lot. It’s an interesting effect when all these movements and adjustments combine.

7R: The sound is so crucial in the film to create the sound of memories. How did you approach that?

Merawi Gerima: They do these studies on, for example, bullfrogs, which are going extinct, where they’ll play a recording from the rainforest from 20 years ago, and they’ll play one now, and [the sound has changed because of the absence of bullfrogs]. That’s the idea I had, that we could take a recording of Q Street from the ‘90s and from now, and in those two recordings, you can show everything this film is trying to say. 

Originally, in the script, I wanted to open the film with that kind of soundscape and no image. I never started the film that way because it evolved beyond that, but the film itself kind of does that by bringing in the sounds of the city that he [Jay] remembers. So [there’s a scene where] he has a visitor to his apartment, and when the door opens, he hears how it [Q Street] used to sound. 

The film is kind of an archive of the community that I want to exist as an actual archive. I want to put as much of my community in the movie as possible.

7R: Since the soundscape has changed so much over time, was it a challenge to recreate the soundscape of your childhood, when it doesn’t exist anymore?

Merawi Gerima: Yeah. I think that we got lucky with certain sounds. Interestingly enough, D.C. kind of repopulates with Black people on the 4th of July. People come from all over back to the neighbourhoods to visit families and houses that are still there, so the population of Black people kind of swells. We were filming across a few 4th of Julys, so we had the opportunity to get these sounds at those times — the kids playing, all that kind of stuff. It’s kind of a cheat. 

The other part was easy. It’s easy to capture the presence of gentrifiers in the city today: construction, people talking, conversations at a brunch table. Those are real conversations. One of the actors came in to audition, and she was talking and just saying these things. The lack of awareness is incredible to me, but at the same time, I’m going to make sure that it makes its way into the film. 

7R: Could you talk about Residue being distributed by Ava DuVernay’s company, ARRAY Now, and how that’s affected the trajectory of the film?

Merawi Gerima: I work very hard to not think about what festivals we will go to or what type of distribution we would have [while I’m making the film itself]. I wanted to create as close to a sandbox environment that we could where we would be free to try whatever we wanted. That’s what we did. We worked as if we had nobody to answer to, because we didn’t. 

Fortunately though, when it came time to distribute and go to festivals, thank God for Slamdance. They resist, in a similar way, where they don’t have as many people to answer to as larger festivals do, so they can choose more freely; they can be more responsive to the art. The fact that they world premiered our film before COVID hit was a blessing. 

Thank God for ARRAY, because Black films never had this type of distribution framework in place before that’s ready to catch and lift up Black stories like this. Distributors, to this day, are still unable to see the commercial potential, if that matters to them, of Black stories. Ava [DuVernay] is ready to see the importance of these stories and also knows how to distribute them in a way that exploits their commercial potential. There’s no better place for this film to be in this moment. 

It’s unfortunate because I think back to my parents, who never had someone like Ava to distribute their films. But we also see Ava as continuing the fight that they contributed so heavily to.

This is an excerpt. Read the full interview in our ebook on creative nonfiction…

Explore the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction

Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction is a tour through contemporary creative nonfiction, aka hybrid or experimental documentaries. Discover films that push the boundaries of the documentary form.

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Lingua Franca quietly reframes a trans woman’s experience

Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca patiently observes the day-to-day life of a trans, undocumented Filipina immigrant living in Trump’s America.

Still from Lingua Franca featuring Isabel Sandoval and Lynn Cohen standing next to each other. The image features the text: Interview.
Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca quietly reframes a trans woman’s experience.

Actor-director Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca provides a quietly subversive reframing of a trans woman’s experience. The film follows Olivia (Sandoval), an undocumented Filipina immigrant working in Brooklyn who is desperately trying to attain a green card while caring for an elderly Jewish-Russian woman, Olga (Lynn Cohen). She begins to form a relationship with the woman’s grandson, Alex (Eamon Farren), a troubled and dissatisfied young man who has taken a job at his uncle’s meat-packing business. 

Lingua Franca is refreshing in how it subverts the often exploitative drama contained within the ‘trans reveal’ — whereby a character’s transgender identity is utilised as a punchline or a dramatic twist. This is an unfortunate trope that permeates so many cinematic depictions of transgender characters. An infamous example of this cliché is the shocking ‘twist’ in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), revealing that the protagonist’s love interest is in fact transgender, a confession that is met with violent disgust. This contributes to a harmful fallacy that trans individuals are inherently deceptive. In Lingua Franca, Olivia’s transness is cruelly revealed to Alex by a boorish and drunken male friend who finds Olivia’s passport containing an old photograph. Rather than a dramatic confrontation between the couple, there is instead a beautifully shot scene of Alex and Olivia dancing where Alex tells Olivia, “I know, and I don’t care.” This subtle, heartfelt sequence is indicative of how Lingua Franca refuses to make a spectacle of Olivia’s identity or suggest that all of her fears and desires are intrinsically connected to her transness. 

Isabel Sandoval as Olivia and Eamon Farren as Alex in Lingua Franca. The two characters are embracing by the sea.
Isabel Sandoval as Olivia and Eamon Farren as Alex in Lingua Franca. Photo courtesy of ARRAY.

Trans representation has certainly become far more nuanced since The Crying Game but even recent films like The Danish Girl (2015) still very much fall into this trap. It’s a rather telling indictment of cinema’s treatment of trans women that Lingua Franca feels so groundbreaking. For example, Sandoval powerfully presents Olivia as an autonomous sexual being through scenes of masturbation and her raw physical encounters with Alex. These moments, while fleeting, are incredibly affirming, providing a cinematic space of safety and compassion that is free from the harsh reality of transphobic violence. Sandoval’s editing is economic, expressing much with very little and offering momentary glimpses into Olivia’s mostly solitary life. These brief snatches of a drunken karaoke party or Olivia’s walks to work are important because they allow for gentle mundanity rather than gruelling situations that are solely based around her transness. 

The film’s visual language reflects the adversity many face within American society, especially marginalised individuals like Olivia. Cinematographer Isaac Banks very often shoots characters through restrictive doorways and windows, replicating the social limitations, judgement, and paranoia that is encroaching upon their lives. Also used to great effect are the snippets of radio shows and television programmes interspersed throughout the film, which position Olivia’s personal anxieties regarding deportation alongside the wider harshness of Trump’s America, so rife with bigotry and oppression. 

Isabel Sandoval as Olivia and Eamon Farren as Alex in Lingua Franca. The two characters are speaking in a kitchen, shot through a doorway.
Isabel Sandoval as Olivia and Eamon Farren as Alex in Lingua Franca. Photo courtesy of ARRAY.

Lingua Franca is most compelling as a series of still images, momentary glimpses, and portraits into otherwise unseen lives. However, it does not entirely function as a satisfying narrative. There’s significantly little rising action or incident as we simply follow Olivia and Alex at work, at home, or during their all too brief time spent with friends and family. The trajectory of their lives is not significantly altered by the places and people they encounter, creating characters who feel somewhat flat. 

Moreover, due to the scarcity of dialogue, Alex and Olivia’s relationship with one another is more implied than depicted. Dreamy images of romance, such as the previously mentioned dance or a heady sequence of Alex and Olivia driving, are sadly the few scenes that we witness of the pair as a couple. The dialogue they do have together (and more generally throughout the film) can also occasionally feel laboured and clumsy, over-emphasising the bleakness of American society and the characters’ desperation, which is already effectively communicated through the film’s visuals.

Despite its flaws, there is much to admire in Lingua Franca’s sensitive depiction of a trans woman’s experiences, its assured visual storytelling, and its careful avoidance of tired tropes. It may lack narrative urgency or progression, but it is firmly grounded in reality. This is not a soapy romance about love against all odds; it’s a film that quietly traces the bleak, displaced, and unsatisfying lives at its centre. 

Lingua Franca is now available on Netflix worldwide.

Read an interview with the directors of The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, another film released by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY Now distribution company in conjunction with Netflix

Read the interview

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Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn on The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open

Co-directors and co-writers Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (who also stars) and Kathleen Hepburn discuss telling Indigenous stories and telling a story in real time. Read our TIFF19 review.

Violet Nelson and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers star in The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Photo Credit: Katrin-Braggadottir.
Violet Nelson and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers star in The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Photo Credit: Katrin-Braggadottir.

The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is a rare film: not only does it centre women’s often invisible experiences, but it also features a cross-cultural encounter between two Indigenous women from different nations and socio-economic backgrounds. We first meet Áila (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) in a doctor’s office where she’s having an IUD inserted; we stay with her as she changes into a gown, goes through the procedure, and prepares to leave — finding meaning in the empty spaces and minutiae, which will define the film. On her way home, Áila spots Rosie (Violet Nelson) a young, pregnant Indigenous woman, on the street who is barefoot and distressed. 

Áila invites Rosie home to offer her shoes, clothes, and comfort, and the film follows the pair in real-time during this encounter. As a Sami woman, Áila feels connected to Rosie’s experience as an Indigenous woman, but Áila also has much more privilege: she’s middle class rather than just out of foster care, and she’s also white-passing. This makes Rosie distrustful of her, no matter how sincerely Áila wants to help; to Rosie, it’s too reminiscent of her experiences with white settlers. Because Rosie is a survivor of abuse, Áila wants to help her get out of her unsafe domestic situation, but effecting change is more complicated than Áila first anticipates.

The Body Remembers is itself a product of collaboration between two women, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (on whom Áila is based) and Kathleen Hepburn, who co-wrote and co-directed the film. Together, they’ve crafted a smart and sensitive film about two very complex and realistic women. The film was picked up for US distribution by Ava DuVernay’s ArrayNow, which has made it available worldwide (outside of Canada) on Netflix. It opens theatrically in Canada this week. In anticipation of the film’s Toronto release, I talked with Tailfeathers and Hepburn about collaborating, telling Indigenous stories, representing class, and the challenges of telling a story in real-time.

7R: What made you want to tell this story and how did you both get involved?

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: The film is inspired by an experience that I had. It’s very similar to the one in the film but we fictionalized it and the characters. As a filmmaker, before this, I primarily had experience directing documentary. I knew that I wanted to tell this story in real time. 

I knew that collaborating with someone with more experience with narrative fiction would only serve to improve the quality of the work, and I would also have the opportunity to learn. I find collaboration to be very enriching. Kathleen has been a friend for a while and I deeply admire her work and who she is as a person. I knew that the project would benefit from collaborating with Kathleen, specifically, so I reached out to ask Kathleen if she would like to co-write and co-direct. That’s how our relationship started.

7R: What was the process for writing The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open together?

Kathleen Hepburn: It was pretty organic. We didn’t have a strategy or a plan. Everything was happening really quickly so we just dove in head first and started writing. Because it was based on an actual event, Máijá had a pretty strong treatment to start with, so we were finding ways to fictionalize the characters and separate them from the real event a bit and also to add all of these complex layers.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: Kathleen is such a phenomenally talented writer. This was my first time doing a narrative feature. I think I often had a tendency to want to put too much on the page so working with Kathleen was a really wonderful experience. Kathleen has this beautiful ability to work with nuance and simplicity on the page.

We wanted to include larger themes that didn’t actually exist within that original experience. Something that was really important to both of us was to speak about the issue of Indigenous youth in foster care. It’s a massive issue in Canada. We wrote Rosie (Violet Nelson) as this young woman who had aged out of foster care very recently and had been deeply impacted by the system. She’s kind of the embodiment of generations of families fractured through child removal [which is the legacy of colonialism], be it through residential schools or foster care. There were a lot of things that we wanted to include within the story that needed to come from a place of fiction.

7R: You mentioned you knew you wanted to tell the story in real time. What made you want to do that, and how did you approach how you were going to do that?

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: It was ultimately about honouring that original experience which was very short. I encountered this young woman who was in distress. I spent a few hours with her, and then I never saw her again. That experience really left a deep and profound impact on me. 

Sometimes, we have these collisions with strangers that really fundamentally alter us. I carried that story with me for years, not really sure what to do with it, and ultimately, decided I wanted to honour her story and our shared experience on that day. At first, I thought maybe this could be a short film, but I realized there was so much there in those moments of silence between us and these moments where nothing was being said, but so much was being communicated. I figured it could be a very powerful feature film if we just allowed the audience to simply sit with that experience. Wanting to shoot it in real time was also one of the impetuses for wanting to collaborate, and then the idea of the continuous take came later on.

Kathleen Hepburn: There were a couple reasons why that was important. We thought about just doing the real time idea, but it became very clear early on that to try to do it in a continuous take would really push us to the next level in terms of creating something that was really honest and held the tension that we wanted to create in this narrative in a feature-length form. We felt it just adds so much, creating conflict and tension and drama for the audience. But we also felt it was the best way for the actors and the crew to experience the moment, the temporality of the original incident, and to give them the full emotional journey in one take. 

We did the film five times over five days, so one take a day for an hour and half, and that was it; we’d move on to the next day. It was a really different experience and a different way of thinking about shooting. I think it really raised the stakes for everybody involved and made for some very authentic performances and some really beautiful accidents.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Violet Nelson star in The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Photo Credit: Katrin Braggadottir
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Violet Nelson star in The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Photo Credit: Katrin Braggadottir

7R: How did that affect your location scouting? You really do get a sense of the city of Vancouver in the film, and you have to travel around while you are doing one take.

Kathleen Hepburn: Yeah, it was a very complicated dance to find locations in one area that made sense for the timing of the script. We had a giant map of East Van [Vancouver] on the wall, and we were sort of trying to build our journey in a way that fit the timing of the script. It was very complicated. We had one location that became too complicated, and we had to switch last minute. But it was fun. It was a heightened challenge, and everybody had to reimagine what production looks like, particularly our AD [Assistant Director] team.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: It was definitely a mental challenge for everybody. There was this really funny moment where our DP drove us around from location to location, and Kathleen and I were in the back seat, reading the script, timing it out, making sure that we could get between the locations before the film mag ran out. Because it was shot on 16mm, we had all these transition points, and we had to make sure we stuck within 10 minutes because the film mag would run out at 11 minutes. There was this funny day where we were driving from location to location, timing out the conversations with traffic at that time of day, and it was a circus, at times.

Rosie (Violet Nelson), standing in Áila’s apartment in The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Photo Credit: Norm Li

7R: Could you tell me a bit about the design of the apartment for your character, Máijá? I felt like we really got a sense of who she is from it.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: We had an incredible art department. The production designers were incredible. So we wanted to be able to build this conversation around class within the Indigenous community — and just class in general — and the way it impacts women’s lives. In particular, the way it impacts our bodies and our ability to choose. Áila is a heightened version of me: my apartment isn’t that nice, and I wasn’t in the same financial situation as her, but I was definitely much more privileged than this young woman when it came to my class. 

Áila’s apartment is meant to be this breath of fresh air, but also feel like this space where a woman has had the privilege and ability to thrive because she has the necessary resources and support. Rosie’s apartment is social housing in East Vancouver, and the apartment was completely empty. Our production designer and art team built that world, and it was meant to feel very lived in and wasn’t perceived through this lens of poverty. 

I think, often, when we are looking at Indigenous people on-screen, there is this need or desire by outsiders to frame us through this lens of poverty and trauma and victimhood, and it’s so much more complicated than that. That’s a deep misrepresentation of who we are and the complexities of human experience. We wanted Rosie’s apartment to feel like a place that was lived in and a place where there is love. But there is also the violence that happens there in all of its many forms. We wanted to have a real juxtaposition between Rosie’s and Áila’s apartments, but that both places feel lived in, and that love can exist in both situations.

7R: Were there other key elements for telling that story about class?

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: Absolutely. Áila is someone who is university educated and is middle class. We imagined that she has a steady job working for the government. There was so much our production design team put into that space. 

One thing that really resonates with me is the books. There’s quite a few books that you will see in the background that are written by prominent Indigenous writers and thinkers that impacted our thinking around telling this story and also impacted me, as an Indigenous woman. It was a way of honouring those texts and that literature and also bringing into the forefront this long history of Indigenous resistance. It is so much more complicated than the need to frame Indigenous people through victimhood. There is resistance, and there has been resistance for a very long time. Our culture is rich in so many ways, including literature and the written word. 

There were so many beautiful pieces of art that were created by Indigenous artists — Indigenous women, in particular — and we were so lucky to be able to feature that artwork. That space is meant to feel like a space where an Indigenous woman has had the ability to thrive and were she is surrounded by art and literature that comes from our own people and our own voices.

Kathleen Hepburn: The only thing I’d add in terms of representing that privilege would be the IUD scene where she [Áila] obviously has the financial means to get a contraceptive device, which is something Rosie doesn’t have access to, or she wouldn’t know how to access those resources. The idea of choosing is another form of privilege.

Rosie (Violet Nelson) take a private moment for herself in the bathroom in The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open, directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn. Photo Credit: Experimental Forest Films, Violator Films
Rosie (Violet Nelson) take a private moment for herself in the bathroom in The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open, directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn. Photo Credit: Experimental Forest Films, Violator Films

7R: For me, it was really powerful all this time that we got to spend alone with each of the characters in private spaces, often in a bathroom, where you could see them recovering from what happened or thinking things through. How did you approach those scenes, and how did you decide whom to stay with? 

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: We rehearsed for four weeks with Violet, and there were so many things to consider about who the lens would be focusing on. Initially, we thought this would just be from Rosie’s point of view, and then we realized it was about both women’s experiences. We made a lot of careful, conscious decisions about who would be the focus in which moment, who would be in power in each moment, and who would have control and agency. Being able to sit in the intimacy of that private space was really important for us.

As an actor, it was a profound experience to be able to marry my experience with theatre and with film; having this long rehearsal process was inspired by theatre. There were so many moments that Kathleen called beautiful accidents because of the luxury of being able to rehearse for four weeks. A lot of those decisions, about where the camera would be and who it would be with, were often made in the rehearsal process. We had the ability to refine the script in those moments and to work with our DP to really figure out where to put the camera in each moment.

Kathleen Hepburn: With the bathroom scenes, I recently read a review where this person was complaining about the changing of the pad scene and why we needed to be there with her. But it was important to show that. There were layers to that scene, but we wanted to remind the viewers that Áila has things going on in her life beyond this moment — and also because, as women, we don’t get to see that represented on screen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman change her pad on camera in this real-time way. For us, it was a tiny, tiny act of pushback against the male gaze and showing all of these private spaces and the trauma that our bodies experience on a monthly basis.

7R: Was the DP Norm Li involved with rehearsals?

Kathleen Hepburn: We had four weeks of just cast, and then we brought Norm [Li] in the last week to start choreographing our blocking. He could see the action that we had been working with, and we spent quite a bit of time with him detailing the character’s action in the rehearsal space, and then we had a full week of full crew rehearsal to get everything fine tuned on the actual sets. It was a really important conversation with him in terms of whose scene is it, who do we stay with, why and who has the power in each moment? So making those choices about how close to be and who to linger with and who do we follow when one leaves the room — those were all conversations we had with Norm.

7R: I imagine the sound in the film was a technical challenge.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: I’m so glad you brought that up because so often we’re talking about the camera, but the technical proficiency required to pull off the sound in the film is so underappreciated. Our sound guy [Ingar Pedersen] was the only person on our crew who had done a single take film before, he had done it twice [one was Seventh Row favourite Blind Spot].

It was very complicated, as I think, at one point, he had twelve lav mics running at once, and then a boom. We’re so lucky to have had him around. We valued silence in telling the story. There was so much said in the silence, so that was something we needed to think about. Our sound designer was incredible. He’s also Norwegian, and that was kind of complicated because sounds are different in Vancouver than Oslo. It was kind of funny having to work through how sound is different on opposite ends of the world.

Kathleen Hepburn: In the sound design, we wanted to accentuate that difference in space. I’m thinking of one example, coming into Áila’s apartment, when you go from this street scene where we have a lot of violent, ambient noise, like sirens and constructions and traffic, coming up into a space that was supposed to feel very open, a moment to breathe — so working with the rain and more natural sounds, you know, birds. But when we are with Rosie in the bathroom, things shift slightly in the background ambience. Because she’s not feeling comfortable in this space, there’s a change in the kinds of sounds we hear outside, which are a little more tense. We were using sound in a way we might have used editing had we done it in a more traditional fashion, but we didn’t have that to work with.

Ailá (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) in Vancouver’s East Side in The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Photo Credit: Experimental Forest Films, Violator Films

7R: Were there specific things you did to make the film sound like Vancouver?

Kathleen Hepburn: Yeah. We used a lot of natural recordings. Our sound designer, [Håkon Lammetun], did come for a few days during the shoot time, and he recorded a lot of ambience there. We had the train, which was a very important sound, and the types of birds we chose were very specific.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: Rain.

Kathleen Hepburn: Windshield wipers

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: So often, the city of Vancouver is not really Vancouver in film. We don’t really get to see Vancouver as it is on film, especially East Vancouver, and that was very important to us because it’s a place where we both lived. Kathleen grew up in Vancouver, and I’ve lived in Vancouver for most of my life. East Vancouver is a very complicated place. 

Vancouver, as a whole, is unceded territory. The local host nation’s territory has been urbanized. There’s also a really beautiful thriving urban Indigenous community with people from all over — and then the complexities of gentrification and where we are as artists in this site of gentrification. It’s a very rapidly changing urban landscape, and we wanted to be able to include all of that — the richness and complexities of East Vancouver.

7R: You’re wearing so many hats in this, Máijá. How do you direct yourself? And how did you two collaborate? I imagine it’s helpful to have a collaborator when you are in most of the scenes?

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: As I mentioned, Kathleen is someone who’s work I deeply admire. She’s definitely an actor’s director. Seeing what she was to able to do with Never Steady, Never Still (2017) just blew me away. It’s such a beautifully moving work of art, something you feel. 

In terms of working with Kathleen, it was a wonderful experience. Initially, I didn’t think I would act in the film because I wanted to be able to fully experience directing, and it’s really complicated to act and direct at the same time. So a lot of the directing came in prep and rehearsal. In this four-week rehearsal process, Kathleen and I were able to really work through our directing decisions, and then I was also able to spend time with the text as an actor and work with Violet, who is so stunning. Believe it or not, but she’s never acted before, so that time we spent with her was really wonderful. 

Our working relationship was very organic. We didn’t really have a specific process in mind other than we are going to spend this time rehearsing, or we are going to spend this time doing this. I wore a lot of hats, but it was also such a beautifully collaborative process. We had such an incredible cast and crew. 

We had this Indigenous youth mentorship project which was so fundamental to the community and the grassroots approach we took to making this film. Film is often so extractive in terms of representing stories of marginalized people on screen, and we wanted this to not be that in any way. We wanted to build community and make sure we were not simply just extracting from the community the stories we were telling on screen.

We hired 11 Indigenous young people in all of our key departments, and they were there throughout the production process,some during pre-production, some in post. Having them there also made everything a little bit different. It grounded us in something real and reminded us of our responsibility to tell this story in the best way possible, in terms of being part of a community. Kathleen and I worked very hard on building a sense of responsibility and respect within our cast and crew.

7R: Can you tell me a bit about the music and the song at the end of the film?

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: The song [Mommy’s Little Guy] is by Fawn Wood, who is an Indigenous woman. The song just really resonated with us. We used it in the rehearsal process as a way to ground ourselves. During the writing process, Kathleen and I felt like we were missing something at one moment, that there was a key element of the script that was really missing, and we came to the realization that it was ultimately about the love between Rosie and her baby. That is what we needed to consistently honour in the story. That song resonated with that theme in every way. It became a part of our rehearsal process and had a deeper meaning for us.

7R: I know you premiered The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open at Berlin and then played it at TIFF. I’m wondering about how you found it was helpful for reception? At Seventh Row, we’re very interested and invested in how we get Canadian films, especially Canadian Indigenous films seen.

Kathleen Hepburn: The film community is still so much about validation, in a lot of ways, and name recognition. Having that stamp of approval from a festival like Berlin is a huge step in getting people’s ears to perk up. You really notice it in conversations with people about the film, and they say, “Oh, is this your first screening?” and we say, “No, we premiered in Berlin” and suddenly you can see the physical shift. I think it is hugely important in reaching more eyes. TIFF is a great festival in creating buzz around the project

But I think what’s been the most amazing for us, so far, is our recent acquisition by Array Releasing, which is Ava DuVernay’s company. We just recently went out to LA and met the team. It was such an incredible experience just to have a group of people who are so professional, so good at their job, but also so invested in the heart of what this project is about, creating space for marginalized voices and really knowing how to access an audience that traditional distributors just don’t quite know how to reach.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: I think it’s complicated, as an Indigenous person, because festivals are so often inaccessible. Even the craft of filmmaking is, in a sense, elitist and inaccessible. To be able to make films is an absolute privilege; you have to come from some form of privilege to be able to be a filmmaker, and festivals in and of themselves are often inaccessible to the general public, to the people who you want to see the film. So it means a lot to screen in these places because it elevates the film in terms of the general film community and the longevity of the film.

But it’s also kind of complicated coming from a marginalized community and knowing that you want your own people to be able to see this film. As Kathleen was saying, it’s really great working with Array because they understand the need for our own communities to be able to access these films, in a way traditional distributor’s don’t really get.

7R: What was different that they did that you found helpful?

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: They understood right away that there are other ways of getting the film out there to audiences. They are very grassroots and community-oriented. They have already built relationships with educational institutions and community organizations. It’s really fantastic knowing the film is going to be screening in alternative spaces that are more accessible to the community.

Discover more great Canadian films

The last year was one of the best for Canadian cinema in history. Discover these great films through conversations with the filmmakers, guided by the Seventh Row editors in our inaugural annual book, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook.

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