Losing a Bit of Control When Our Bodies Move in Circles Interview with Lynne Sachs Interviewed by Huei-Yin Chen In October 2024, Women Make Waves International Film Festival in Taiwan invited US experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs to lead an interactive workshop "The Body in Space" and attend the QA sessions for her latest short film Contractions and accompanying sound piece We Continue to Speak. Workshop participants attended one online and one in-person workshop. Over a period of a few weeks, each of the 30 participants produced a one-minute video which was then compiled into a single half-hour compilation that was integrated into a live performance as the final presentation for the festival public. Under the very limited time constraints of the workshop, Lynne Sachs generously shared eight of her own films with the students in advance. Through these films, she encouraged the participants to think about the relationship between the body and space from the perspective of performance and imagery. Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has been rigorously pushing boundaries as an experimental filmmaker and poet. These eight films became an excellent entry point for understanding her recent creative trajectory. Starting with Contractions (2024) and We Continue to Speak (2024), which were screened during the film festival, we also talked about four works out of the eight works shared in the workshop——Your Day Is My Night (2013), A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (2019), Maya at 24 (2021 ), and Film About A Father Who (2020). These works can be connected to the discussion of the body, space, and framing during the workshop: the spectrum of the subject matter shifting from works that are more socially engaged and in collaboration with local activist groups or residents; the creative relationship between her and other experimental filmmakers; and, finally to her closest inner circle, herself and family members. Such assumptions lead to a process that moves from the outside toward the inside, like drawing a circle. As time goes by, the overlapping trajectories become more dense, all the issues, subject matters, and emotions are intertwined with each other, and the inside and outside becomes intertwined with each other. All come together. In her practice, Lynne Sachs invited her family members to run and walk in a way that deviate from their daily routine. In the face of the most embarrassing situations or creative difficulties, she mentioned the preciousness of collaboration with others. Sometime while we talked, a lot of words were left out of the formal interview, and later picked up in random chats, or during a follow-up online interview when she suddenly turned her computer around and let me see the New York street scene through her window. Q: Maybe we can start from a more social dimension of your work. Let’s start with Contractions, which is very outspoken about the legal situation in US. You know, in some ways Contractions is outspoken. And in some ways Contractions is a film that recognizes silence. It recognizes that those people who are most affected by any kind of political upheaval often don't know how to speak, don't have access to the microphone that would allow them to be heard, and so they had this sensation of being silenced. When I decided to make this film, I was trying to think of a form that could recognize an erasure as much as a presence. Initially, there was this 2023 call from a filmmaker in California [Kristy Guevara-Flanagan] who was very upset about the end of Roe vs. Wade (the 1973 law that gave women the right to an abortion throughout the US), the new Supreme Court decision which gave each state the right to make its own laws about a woman’s right to have an abortion. She put out an announcement looking for people who wanted to make a film about abortion clinics that no longer offer services. And so about five or six of us responded, and formed the Abortion Clinic Film Collective. I realized that this was an opportunity to go back to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, because I'm very interested in this relationship we have to the place where we grew up. I was very upset that something we had taken for granted about the decision-making process about our own bodies had been taken away. We all make assumptions about living in a civil society. You don't know what you have until you lose it. I felt like it wasn't just that our rights were taken away. It was like our faces were taken away and our voices were taken away. I wanted to figure out how I could visualize that. I was actually inspired by Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island (1985) in which she took a group of performers and dancers to an island off the coast of Manhattan. There was this decaying old building. She took performers there and had them interact with the building. The way that performance activates real spaces is very interesting. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan had one requirement for all of the participating filmmakers: we all needed to go to a clinic that used to offer abortion services and no longer does. So I thought, how do I interact with a building? My cousin is an activist in reproductive justice, she performs in the Vagina Monologues every year in Memphis. So she helped me find the people who were in the film. I actually just finished a part two to Contractions, called This Side of Salina. I collaborate with a Black women's empowerment group [Layla’s Got You] for that. The film was projected outdoor in Syracuse, New York onto an exterior façade of the Everson Museum of Art, which was designed by the renowned Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei. I have their voices in the film and they also perform in it, a similar spirit to Contractions. Contractoins Q: One thing I am also curious about is the covering of faces in Contractions. Even in New York now, there are religious protesters every single day in front of clinics that offer women’s health services, including mammograms! Abortion is only a small part of what these clinics offer. People are also coming there for urinary tract infections, for example. All of those women are photographed by the protesters because the protesters don't know who is actually coming to have an abortion. So they film everybody and invade everybody's privacy. I could give two answers about the covering of faces. One, the practical answer, is that someone choosing to be in this film was making a decision that was a little bit precarious. I asked everyone to sign a document stating that they were willing to be photographed, but I promised them there would be no faces. And then accidentally, we had one shot where we didn't turn the camera off after people had already turned their bodies. And I love that shot because I love little mistakes. I needed to go back and ask everybody's permission to include the shot. So I made a screenshot and I sent it to each person individually. In the film, you see women not only covering their faces but also are bowing. Maybe there's a little ambiguity here: I'm bowing with strength, but also maybe you're asking me to be subservient too. Are the performers bowing to the power? And, who’s bowing. I wanted to spark these questions. Q: Did you come up with the sound piece We Continue to Speak after finishing Contractions? I realized that personally I was uncomfortable with not letting the women speak because the whole idea was they were silenced. I think they have a lot to say, so I went back to Memphis just a few months later. I got all the women in the film together, plus one of the men in the film. I also interviewed a woman named Dr. Kimberly Looney, who had been the director of medicine for Planned Parenthood in Tennessee, as a central part of the voice-over. She's very respected in the state of Tennessee and she's very involved with Black women's health. But I had told her from the start, you don't have to put your name in the film because it could cause problems at the hospital where she works. And then she decided that she wanted her name in it. We've only shown the film once in Memphis. She came with her mother and her daughter. And she said, “My mother is scared for me, but I'm not scared.” Q: How long did it take to shoot the film? About three hours, since it was potentially dangerous to do so. In fact, when we were organizing the production, I had every shot drawn out because I knew we had very little time. I had never seen the building before, but I had drawings imagining it. My cousin and her friend were helping organize everything. She brought a volunteer marshal for security, in case we had protesters or something worse. Keep in mind, this clinic was known for offering abortions. Yes, it was closed, so why would 14 women in patient medical robes be standing in front of that building? People who were very much against abortion might have done anything. One of the local co-producers later told me during the QA of True/False Film Fesitval that we actually had 14 security marshals in different places, like in cars or and behind windows. It just shows you that this issue is very charged. Just a few years ago, several abortion doctors were basically assassinated in the US. Q: In both Contractions and This Side of Salina you collaborated with the local activist groups and individuals. In Your Day Is My Night, this layer of collaboration transferred to that of the local Chinese community in New York City. This film looks at the shift-bed (temporary) housing phenomenon in Chinatown as a backdrop, resulting in a hybrid documentary-performance project. One thing that became kind of joyous in the film was that the people in the film found pleasure in playing with the camera. In documentary, there's a way of emphasizing the moment of the reveal. There's also this way of developing a trust. And I think both of these systems can be kind of formulaic and manipulative. I just tried to get the participants in the film excited to do something that was different and might bring something new to their own lives. I never wanted them to feel “I'm doing this because this story hasn't been told before, or people outside the community need to see it.” In fact, there was an exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum we went to yesterday called “Enclave.” I really like the word “enclave.” You could look at Chinatown as an enclave, or this women’s film festival as an enclave. This very thought-provoking exhibition made me reflect on a seemingly hermetic space that can transform into a more porous one. Your Day is My Night For this film, I'd conducted audio interviews that became the basis for our film script, distillations you might say of these much longer interviews. In a sense, each member of the cast was able to have fun performing their own lives. If someone is in my film, I like to find ways that they get to be inventive or to harness their own imagination. We were working on this film as a live performance for about two years before it became a film. I thought it was going to be a film, but I didn't know how to make it. Honestly, I went through a kind of creative desperation, trying to figure what to do. Your Day is My Night was a live performance first, and then it returned to being a film. This is the film that got me excited about working in this way. Q: It's a very hybrid film that blurs the docu-fiction boundary. Can you also talk about the Puerto Rican performer? Well, we'd been working for a year, and one day we all got together – our cast and crew - and the cast told me that audiences would be really bored with our movie because they thought their own lives were really boring. As a group, they suggested that our film needed a better story that people would care about, perhaps some romance. I proposed this idea: What would happen if someone outside, like me or a Puerto Rican woman, moved in? Remember, we were talking about that idea of disrupting a hermetic space! So, I invited a Puerto Rican actress who had worked with me on other projects to join our filmmaking community. Everyone had a much better time once I made it hybrid. We needed to free ourselves from the limitations of our own reality, you might say. Q: I really like the way you mentioned ‘enclave’ and the idea of porous relationship. I would like to mention A Month of Single Frames here, because in this case, you are dealing with someone else’s materials. The film is made up of Barbara Hammer’s film footage and sound recordings shot in the 80s. I love finding out that Barbara Hammer came here to Taipei, two times. I didn't know that until I arrived here. I made two films with Barbara. Barbara and I had known each other since the 80s because we both lived in San Francisco and we were involved in the Film Arts Foundation. And we both moved to New York, so we kept up a lot over that period of time. In around 2006, she found out that she had ovarian cancer. That was about the time when she turned 60, and I promised to give her a birthday present, which was to shoot a roll of film with her and her wife, Florrie Burke. But she was so busy that it took me years to set up an appointment with her. And by that time, I was quite involved in her life through her cancer. So each time she had chemotherapy, my husband Mark Street would cook and I would deliver, so we were getting closer through that experience. In 2018, I finally got to shoot the roll of 16mm color film with her. You can see that footage in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor. I asked all three of these remarkable women artists who also happen to be dear friends, “How does the camera allow you to express yourself?” They all knew each other, but they never expected to be in one cinematic vessel together. Let’s call the film a female bonding moment perhaps. Thinking across generations, Carolee and Barbara were exactly the same age as my mother. They were all born in 1939. Gunvor Nelson was ten years older. In 2018, when Barbara really knew that she was dying, she asked me and three other filmmakers, including my husband Mark Street, to make films with material that she wasn't able to finish. So what happened was that she gave me the footage of material she had shot during an artist residency in Cape Cod in 1998, but at first she'd forgotten she kept a detailed journal as well. I asked if I could record her reading out loud from her journal. I thought I'd be able to take it home and pick the parts. But she was in a hurry. She knew that life was not long for her. She asked me to go in the other room and pick out what she was going to read, right away. One thing that was important to me was to actually find a way to communicate with her, maybe in a kind of transcendent way outside of the film, because she passed away while I was making it, so she never saw it finished. And the text becomes my communication with her and with the audience. Q: I really like the on-screen texts. They are very beautiful. Thank you. She never saw that. I felt that I needed to enter the material with her. But also it allowed me to understand something that's very specific to film. When you're inside a film, you're actually in another period of time. We leap from the now to the then or to the future. And as you're watching the film, you're actually watching it with Barbara and me next to you. That's a cosmic thing that film can do that, that you feel like you were in the room with Barbara. And it doesn't have to do with her being dead or being a ghost. She's very present in the film. And I knew that and I wanted to celebrate that. A Month of Single Frames In fact, Barbara had arranged for all of us to have some funding for the post production from the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. I flew from New York City to Columbus early one morning so that I would arrive in Ohio ready to start. As I was heading there, I fell asleep on the plane. I woke up and I wrote all the text. It came to me in a dream. I was thinking about the environment, she had filmed in, the sand dunes in 1998. So it's kind of like your epidermis, the top layer of your skin. Your skin is the same as the sand, both have evolved over many years; your skin is slightly different, scarred or wrinkled, same with the land. In film, we feel as if we can go back in time. That's what I was thinking about with Maya at 24. We can go back or simulate going back, and we can feel that there is also a here and now for us. You are here, I'm here. We're all here. Because it's activated by you, the audience. Q: Speaking of Maya at 24, its sense of time is very unique. You film your daughter Maya running in circles, clockwise, at ages 6, 16 and 24, while a sense of time is simultaneously embodied through the movement. Can you talk about this gesture of running in circles? I like that there's a way that the person holding the camera loses power and control, while the person running gets to have fun. I like that disorientation. And also I like the eye contact that happens. The person who's following your directions doesn't really have to do much, but they're definitely doing something that's out of character. Even a little gesture, you notice how the camera is able to see how my daughter moves a piece of hair behind her ear, in a mature kind of way. There's a moment when she's 24 where she self-consciously makes this gesture. When she's 16, she's more defiant. And when she's 6, she's kind of more playful with me, more physical. In fact, I made three films, all shot in 16 mm. The first one is called Photograph of Wind, referencing an expression that I heard the renowned American photographer Robert Frank use. Maya as a word also means illusion. I was trying to hold onto her childhood, but it was ephemeral and it was going away like the wind. I called the second iteration Same Stream Twice. It came from the Greek philosopher Hiraclitus who wrote you can never step in the same stream twice, but in film you can step in the same stream twice. Maya at 24 was shot when she was 24 years old. It’s also about film itself running at 24 frames per second. So it's a little reference to the materiality of the medium. There's something I find very energizing and unpredictable, about the flow of two circles running almost in opposite directions or two circles spinning at different rates so that you have this sense of being behind and ahead. And there's an unpredictable register, which has to do with the person filming, with my energy, my ability, my stability, and the person who is being filmed. If you are in motion, sometimes you lose a little bit of self-consciousness. You're just thinking about working together on this very unambitious and unfamiliar project, which is running in circles. So I took that way of working into Film About A Father Who. There's a point where my father's walking along in a circle. And my mother did that too. Q: For Film About A Father Who, I really have to say it was a bountiful watching experience, with materials that span 35 years of documentation and creation that also encompass different mediums including 16 and 8 millimeter, video , and digital. As an experimental filmmaker, how do you perceive the medium in this film? So, it's interesting to me to consider that as I was making the film, technology kept changing. There's an assumption that as technology changes, it witnesses and documents our lives. We assume it gets better, that there is a pure, mimetic relationship to what you see with your eyes and what you record. Even though I see myself as an experimental filmmaker who likes the degraded or imperfect image, the more I looked at my old material, the more critical I was of it. I was critical of the medium, but I was even more critical of my skills. But deeper than that, honestly, was a kind of aesthetic critique of my father and of our lives. I had a lot of embarrassment. I was deeply embarrassed about my work as an artist and about my role as a daughter. That was one of the reasons I couldn't finish it. I could shoot it, but I couldn't look at it. I just had a lot of shame. And I did have anger. Initially, I started the film because I thought my dad was really interesting. He was an iconoclast. He was a rule breaker. He was maybe one of the reasons I found myself making the kind of films that I make. I wasn't intimidated by odd situations, and that's the way he was. But then as things kept happening, I became more and more uncomfortable. Sometimes I wanted to make a critical film, sometimes an introspective film. In fact, I discovered that at different points, different camera registers or modalities worked better for different subjectivities. Film About A Father Who Q: About degraded image, there is one certain sequence that repeats: kids playing in a little stream. The timing of repetition is quite crucial, too. I show that little stream three times at three different moments pulled from one long shot, and it's critical to the narrative of the film. But what is more interesting to me is that each time you as a viewer are thrown back into that scene, you know more. You have gained knowledge, and you have shifted your position from being an outsider to being omniscient. You realize that you have been privy to information and to a complexity that not everyone in the film is aware of, so that's compelling to me to let the viewer grow with that image. To me, it's probably the prettiest image in the film. In Hito Steyerl’s article, In Defense of the Poor Image, her writing is a celebration of how images travel through culture and become changed in the ways that our bodies change. We get wrinkles, and we get less vibrant, and images do the same thing. They reveal something about the time in which they were made, but also the time in which we as viewers currently live. But I didn't understand how important this was to me as an artist until I made this film. Because, the first time my editor and I went through all the footage, that kind of image (the stream image), was one that I probably dismissed. It was on a degraded, improperly archived tape that my father had shot on Hi 8 in the 1980s. Time had not been kind to the material. So with Hi 8, you had these tapes that were like the size of your palm. They went into the camera and you would shoot. And then you would go home and you would connect your camera with a cable to a machine with a VHS tape, and you would transfer the original to a VHS tape. And then, you would reshoot over the original tape with new material. There was no original anymore! Everything was just a copy, and each copy was more degraded than the one before it. Since I had forgotten this technical fact, I spent a couple of years trying to find the original of that tape. Then I finally realized that my dad wouldn't care about the original. He just wanted to collect images and watch them. I went back to the VHS tape, which was just a considered a viewing format, not of serious historical importance to archivists anywhere. But when I had it digitized, I realized it is a lot prettier than the digital images of today. It looks more like an Impressionist painting. It has more of an essence than a more precise, better preserved image would ever have, plus it’s got Dad's voice speaking to his children. There you see these three children, my half siblings. My father was probably standing behind a camera using a tripod. I guess he forgot he was even recording! Consequently the shot was about 8 minutes long, long enough for him to reveal something very loving, stern in a fatherly way, which my dad usually wasn't, and very relational. He was dealing with children in a very traditional parent-child way. And the other thing about the image is that it had become pink and yellow and soft blue. The image is truly painterly, so beautiful. Everything about it was meaningful to me. We're always using the camera to witness other people's presence in the world, but it's also such a gift to see how they frame their own world. So that shot of the children in the little stream is how my father saw his younger children, the ones from the 1980s, my half-siblings. And it's very loving. Q: As the film attempts to unveil various “truths” in one family, it also unveils another kind of complexity itself, which turn the clear distinction between good or bad totally upside down, maybe that’s where all the love and hate come from. That was exactly the gateway I had to go through to make this film. It wasn't a simple judgment or any emotional realization that came to me. I needed to find a place for something else. I think almost everyone has a person in their family that they're constantly trying to figure out -- where to place them in their consciousness. With our parents, for example, they each choose what they want to share with us in the cosmos of family. In the film, I wanted to find formal ways of articulating transparency, obfuscation, even covering up. But I think what's more interesting is giving a viewer the ability to understand that everything we interpret comes with layers of meaning. For example, when you see my father in a tuxedo going to these ostentatious galas with my grandmother dressed in a fancy ballgown, what you realize is that there is no transparency here. It's all performance. That's why I intentionally use a little bit of Disney music. This scene actually feels very unreal. Before my father would go see my grandmother, he would always cut his hair. This way his way of being who he wasn't. And that's actually one of the most poignant things in the film. Here's someone whom generally society does not approve of, at least in term of how he conducted his life. But then parallel to it this is a son who could never be himself with his mother. And there's pathos there. I think where you find pathos in a film is like an entry point. Not pity, not disgust, not just elation because something great happens, but where you find pathos is really important to me. Film About A Father Who As a filmmaker, I need to find an interesting moment between every cut. Even in my longer films, I never want a cut to be simply the result of cause and effect. I want an edit between two shots to be an entry point of activation for a viewer, then there's possibilities of pathos, as well so many other sensations. Q: In this film, you are not the only person who was filming. Other than the stream sequence shot by your father, we can constantly see your brother filming. In a way, it seems that your family members are quite used to having someone in the family who is filming. Nevertheless, I am really curious what made you want to finish the film? My brother [Ira Sachs] is a filmmaker who makes narrative films. But there was a period of time where he went with my father to Moscow, and he would sometimes go down to Florida with my father for my grandmother's birthday. There was a way that my father would talk to my brother, in that man-to-man kind of way, even though he knew my brother was gay. He would show Ira a list of all the women he's trying to date or sleep with. My brother found that to be a turnoff, but he kept the camera going. So that occurred to me. When I was trying to work on this film, I asked my brother if he could look for the outtakes from Get It While You Can (2002), the short film he made from his Moscow footage. In this way, Film About a Father Who would not offer just a single perspective on a man. Let me tell you one of my favorite images that was shot by Ira. He's on the bed and he's listening to our father in the other room with a young woman, during their trip to Russia. Ira’s holding the camera, you see his feet and a floor lamp, and he's humming to himself. And it's amazing because you feel like you're in this young man's head. It's so internal. Both scenes are really gendered, but play out by revealing something complex going on between a father and a son. For me, this all plays out like a Cubist painting, let's say a Picasso's painting of his daughter Maya. He's trying to articulate different planes of perception, and that's how a family works. That's what this film is recognizing. Those different points of view. I am trying to see how a family works anthropologically. For example, I got very interested in how lying works in our family. I think all families are built around a series of white lies. People try to protect the ones they want to protect, but they also try to protect themselves. But the thing is in a film like this, you're still journeying, since, as a filmmaker, you're hiding behind the camera too. Q: This film also tackles some of hard situations. I remember there is a scene where his girlfriend and second wife sit side by side. I remember the year I shot that scene, in 1992, and I was shooting with a really good 16 mm Arriflex camera. I had just started dating my now husband Mark, who is also a filmmaker, and I asked him to record sound. I looked at that footage right when I got it back from the film lab, and I knew it looked “pretty.” I also knew that it was very dramatic, and very disturbing. It showed two women being very honest about their feelings and their assessment of their situation. But once I looked at it after I got the film footage back, I didn't look at it for probably 25 years, and it moved around with me in carboard boxes from California, to New York, to Maryland. It moved with me everywhere, and it became this Pandora’s Box saying “Look at me!” And, I couldn't look at it. And then, I reconnected with a former student of mine named Rebecca Shapass. She started working with me as my studio assistant, and I just said, “let’s look at the footage together.” For some reason, I never felt embarrassed, and it was a breakthrough. We went through every tape and every roll of film. And that was kind of a watershed moment. I was able to explore ideas with her, as we sat side by side, so she ended up being the editor for the film. We did it together, and it was very freeing for me. I'll never forget that connection that we had. 註1：本文中文版本原載於國家電影及視聽文化中心出版之《放映週報》776 期 註2: 本文所有劇照皆由琳恩・薩克斯提供 Note 1: For the Chinese version, please refer to Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s Funscreen Weekly No. 776: https://funscreen.tfai.org.tw/article/38821 Note 2: All the film stills used in this interview are provided by Lynne Sachs. With many thanks to Lynne Sachs, who made the following films available to watch for free (links available for 6 months) Contractions Dir. Lynne Sachs, 12 min., 2024 with English and Chinese subtitles https://vimeo.com/970157403 We Continue to Speak Dir. Lynne Sachs, 4 min. sound only, 2024 https://vimeo.com/943243601 Your Day is My Night Dir. Lynne Sachs, 64 min. 2013 with Chinese and English Subtitles Dir. by Lynne Sachs https://vimeo.com/233483276 A Month of Single Frames Dir. Lynne Sachs, 14 min. color sound 2019 Made with and for Barbara Hammer with subtitles in multiple languages https://vimeo.com/420309099 Maya at 24 Dir. Lynne Sachs, 4 min., 2021 https://vimeo.com/491252200 Film About a Father Who 74 min. 2020 Director Lynne Sachs with subtitles in multiple languages https://vimeo.com/358398460
Q. You’re known for making films about a wide range of different social causes, such as climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, migration, what inspired you to focus on the Austin federal class action lawsuit in the first place? I think from all my previous work too, it's always been impact-driven. The reason I started making films in the first place was not because I wanted to make films. I don't have a film background, but I have more of an academic background, I would say. I care a lot about different issues. I saw film, specifically documentary, to be one of the most powerful tools to share knowledge, to make people understand complex issues, issues you might read about in the report or in the news but you don't feel them. But if you watch a film you can actually feel the issues, right? So that's why I started making films and that's the type of films I look for. My husband is American, and I moved to Austin because he was living there. So I lived there for a year, and then I learned about the lawsuit. When I heard about it, I was both shocked because I didn't know how bad the system was. When I learned that that the majority of sexual assault cases were just dismissed, I was like, how come no one I know is talking about this? None of my friends or family were discussing this issue and so I thought maybe I can do something about it, with my tool which is documentary film to create more awareness around this. I was really curious to see whether they would succeed because I learned that it was a very difficult case, that they were unlikely to win, it was a David and Goliath kind of case. When I met the women, I could see that there was some sort of fire within them and this will be a powerful film, no matter the outcome, because they're really fighting for something important and they're not gonna give up. I can tell that they were not gonna give up. That's how I decided to make the film. At the end of the film, it was mentioned that some of the changes. For example, Hannah is working now with the Austin Police Department. She's actually like the project leader to reform how they handle sex crimes. So Hannah's had a really amazing journey, from suing the police to now working with the police, but she's so good at it. She's really important in leading the change that's happening in Austin. So it's been to me maybe the most inspirational thing about this project was to see where they all started; because I filmed for many years, so I could see where they started and then how far they came at the end of the film, and also what it meant for them that their case succeeded. It really transformed many of them. Q.At the end of the film, it was mentioned that some of the women are still working with the Austin Police Department? Yeah, Hannah is working now with the Austin Police Department. She's actually like the project leader to reform how they handle sex crimes. So Hannah's had a really amazing journey, from suing the police to now working with the police, but she's so good at it. She's really important in leading the change that's happening in Austin. So it's been to me maybe the most inspirational thing about this project was to see where they all started; because I filmed for many years, so I could see where they started and then how far they came at the end of the film, and also what it meant for them that their case succeeded. It really transformed many of them. Q.About raising awareness, what are some changes you're hoping to see, maybe some of the works that the police department and DA's office is doing? For me the film is part of raising awareness, but I also wanted to be a tool for the women in the film to use to further their work, because they're already doing so much work. Knowing how powerful documentary film can be, I thought that this film, once it's done, they can use it. They can use it to show it to people who need to see it. Because they're really the experts on the issue, not me. They're the ones who know exactly what changes are needed. I know what they're hoping for is more cases being prosecuted and for that to happen we need more detectives and the police. We need better investigation, and we need more money for this type of crime because it's not really prioritized. So that's a big thing, making sure there's enough funding for the police and the staff in this unit to be trained. Another thing that’s important to them is to have a district attorney who will meet with them, meet with the survivors and hear their story, because what happened before was that all cases were just dismissed without ever meeting. There was never any meeting between the DA and the survivors. It was only just dismissed. So it’s really important to have a DA who will actually take the time to listen to the survivors. We are using the film now for training police. It's now used in Austin and in Texas as part of training police officers in sexual assault. And I think that's been really amazing to see the film used as like a training tool, where police officers who are learning about sexual assault can understand what happens if they don't do things right. Finally, because the lawsuit was not so well known across the US even though it was big, but a lot of people never heard about it, and so I hope the film can help police and DA of cities in other parts of the country see that this happened in Austin, they didn't take this seriously, they dismissed all the cases, then they were sued and they had to pay a lot of money, so we should just change on our own, before someone sues us. I hope this film can help push for that change, without another group of survivors having to spend five years of their lives asking for that change. Q. In the film, we saw the first DA said, “we do have a responsibility towards the victims, but we also have to watch out for the accused.”Has there been any similar backlash since they started? Are people still holding on to that notion that women are just going to falsely accuse them? It’s true as a DA you have responsibility for all. That is part of her role as DA. But what happened was that it didn't really seem like they felt a responsibility for the victims or the survivors. It seemed like by default the accused were always believed over women. I think the new DA has a different perspective. He was someone the women had already talked to and met, so he understands the issue differently. I feel it’s like a societal way of thinking. In our patriarchal society, there's this thought that women are doing this just to get money, fame, whatever. I don't understand why they think women are doing it because reporting a rape to the police is really difficult and it's a very long and hard process. For the fact that people say that it's false, that many of them are false, it's not true. But I think it's just part of how society unfortunately views women versus men. Q. In the film we can see that this woman comes forward and their case gets mishandled, eventually they start to internalize the doubting from the police officers. During the filmmaking process, how did you feel listening to them saying all this? I think all of them felt some sort of doubt or shame of “was it that bad? Have I done something wrong? Should I have somehow prevented this?” And I think it is because as a society we somehow place the shame on the survivor rather than on the perpetrator and one thing I'm seeing more and more is that people are trying to shift this shame, so the shame is not on the woman but rather on the rapist or the perpetrator. But I think it is a very internalized way of thinking that I'm sure many of us would feel because there's something about rape being a crime that's so closely associated to to consensual sex. Often it could be someone you know who assaulted you. I know Hannah, for instance, talked about her assault and was like, “was that rape? I don't know.” And that's something I heard from many people, that they doubt their own experience. And I really think that since this is how society is, it's also reflected in the police, in the judges, in the DA. So there really needs to be a real shift in society in how we think about women and sexuality and what a rape is. But I think more and more now I'm hearing that it's at least going in a better direction with this particular issue. Also, I think the whole good, bad victim thing is so important to include in the film. And that's why, for instance, Marina is a really wonderful protagonist in the film because she was like, I know that I would be seen as a bad victim, because I was drinking, I was out late at night, I was gonna buy drugs. But she's very firm in her belief: even though all those things happen, it doesn't mean someone can rape me. That's not okay. So I felt like she was very unapologetic about who she is and what she experienced and she's demanding justice from the beginning. And then there's a contrast between her and Hannah. Hannah was much more uncertain, “okay, maybe my case wasn't so bad.” It's also reflected in the different types of assaults. Hannah’s perpetrator being someone she knew in her personal relationship, whereas Marina’s was a stranger. I felt one thing that was really clear to me from the case was that even if you're a “good victim” or “bad victim” in Austin it didn't matter, because no cases were taken. That was part of that philosophy behind the case that they put together a group of women who are so different. They have different age, class, race, occupations, abilities, and very different types of assaults and none of them were taken. The point of the case is to show that it doesn't matter what kind of woman you are, what kind of assault it is, as long as you're a woman, they don't care. Q. How do you think about the lawyers’ attitudes make Hannah and other women more assured of what happened and willing to take that stand that they want their voices to be heard? I think Jenny and Elizabeth played a really important role for all of these women. There was something about them saying, we believe you and what happened to you was not right. Hearing those words for a lot of the plaintiffs in the case was very powerful because none of them had said that. I'm sure some of them have people who believe them, or family members who supported them, but I think there's something different about a lawyer saying, “look, there's something wrong here. Like, it shouldn't be like this. You shouldn't have to experience this.” I think most of us who are not lawyers might just say, okay, I guess that's how the system is. I guess we can't change it, but Jenny and Elizabeth really thought they could change it. I know that for Hannah, she was not sure if she wanted to join, because she felt like her case was not so bad and she thought, “since my case was not so bad, maybe it would water down the lawsuit. It’d be negative for me to join the other women, because my case was not as strong as theirs.” In fact, her case was really something they wanted because it shows a very typical scenario result and so it took her a long time to see that. But when she did, she really joined and became a really important person in the case and in the movement. During the time they decided to start the second case, Hannah was supposed to be the front of the new case. You know, Hannah is a very private person. I don't think she wanted to be in this situation. She's told me many times, “I don't know if I want to be on film.” She doesn't want people to know personal details about her. But I think she saw it as necessary in a way. It was not where she thought she would see herself, but she really did become a spokesperson for the case and still is. I think out of all of them, she's now the one who's the most involved in creating these changes. In fact, the case was not only about these women's experiences, but it was a class action lawsuit. So it was about everyone. It was about systemic change. I really think for all of them that was the main motivation: it was for what happened to them to not only be a terrible thing but also be turned into something good for someone else. Q. What kind of role does such solidarity and this community of women play in this story you're telling? I thought it was important to show them coming together because it was really the whole reason why it worked out. It's not a single person suing, it's a group, it's an army. I wanted to show that they were growing and I wanted to show Marina and Hannah, because they didn't know each other, and then they met and became friends, like an unlikely duo in a way. They had different ages and different backgrounds. They would not have been friends if it wasn't for this case, but they became really good friends and work together. I wanted to show the power of women coming together to fight for something they believed in. And I also saw that the fact that they were a group meant a lot for them to succeed because it's mentally hard to be a part of. They have to tell their stories over and over and over again. I think the fact that there were just a group of women who, when one person couldn't do it anymore, someone else took over, that really made it possible to do this marathon of a case. Q. What inspires the choice to include Jenny and Elizabeth’s wedding in the film and show friendship between these women? I was talking with my two editors and one of them was like, I remember the wedding. We were like, you're probably not going to include it because it's a bit on the side. It's not directly related to the case, but I really wanted it to be a part of the film because I thought it encapsulated so much of what the case was about. Jenny and Elizabeth ended up becoming important characters in the film, and it was because no other lawyer wanted to take the case. Mary Ruth, or Amy Smith, she tried for a long time to find a lawyer and couldn't find anyone who would take it. And Jenny was her last attempt, so the case was very much dependent on Jenny's willingness to take on. Jenny and Elizabeth met through the case and fell in love, and I felt this was a moment of joy. In a film about sexual assault and rape, there's not so many moments of joy. I wanted to show them all having a good time, being happy, not thinking about rape or sexual assault or the lawsuit, but justcelebrating something wonderful. I'm really glad we can fit it in there. Q. There was a powerful scene where Amy eventually reclaimed her name at the end of the film, and then all these women move on with their lives. So we can see that they're not just growing as a group but they're also moving forward with their life individually. One thing I saw quickly when I started working on the film is, maybe in particular Marina, she was like, “my life was on hold until this is over. I feel like I can’t decide what I want to do, I can’t move on with my life before this case is done.” It’s hard to explain how tense it was to just wait for years and years and years. It was really hard for a lot of them to not know when they would be done. I saw that many of them put what they would have liked to do with their lives on hold for the case, so I really wanted to show not just the case, but also how it affected their personal lives and the choices they could or couldn't make. Like Marina, she was 19 when she was raped and the case ended when she was 26 or 27. In her early 20s, she saw all of her friends move to different cities, get different jobs, go to grad school, but she couldn't. She was just a bit stuck. I thought an important part of the case is also how their personal lives were affected and that's also part of the joy of being able to follow someone over a long time to see how their lives change. So Marina getting a boyfriend, and moving was just really wonderful to see, after the case was over, how happy she was. She was like, finally, I can do what I want, I can have fun, I don't need to always worry about the case. It was a very long journey to make this film. I would say it did affect my personal life too, because every day I wouldn't know if I would get a call and I need to film. I was filming and doing sounds and directing alone. I didn’t have anyone to talk to or discuss things with, so I felt that it was a little bit of a lonely process. Of course I became friends with Marina and Hannah and Mary and Jenny and Elizabeth, so it wasn't lonely in that way. My husband is American and we decided to move back to Norway. We had planned it, but I need to finish my film. So we planned everything around the case, so that it would be after the hearing, and then suddenly it was delayed, so it couldn't move for a while. It did affect my life too. I did feel a big relief like the women when the case was over, because then I didn't have to always be on alert waiting for something to happen. Q. Telling a story about criminal justice system involves certain level of prior knowledge about American law, how do you make it more accessible for the audience to understand what's happening? I wanted to make sure it was understandable for an international audience who don't know the US system, both with the DA election and the legal system. But then I also didn't want it to be so simplified that an American viewer would think it was too simple. I needed to have enough detail so that also it would be interesting for someone who did know the system. It was a bit challenging. There was so much more that I filmed and so much more that happened in the case that didn't make it into the final film. We had to cut a lot of ups and downs and this and that so the case itself is really complicated. It was a hard editing process. Q. What are some of those moments that you couldn’t include in the film but you felt was important to you? The judge dismissed the case and invoked the immunity of the DA and that then it should be filed in state court. A state judge should deal with this, not only a federal judge, so he said, go file it in state court. And then they did. But then the DA and the police came and said, “you have to be in federal court.” So I really saw that the legal team of the police and DA kept just trying to mess with them in a way, like they kept sending these briefs just to drag it out. Essentially, I felt like they were trying to drag out the process so much that the women would give up. It made me really mad, like they're really messing with people's lives. These women are not doing this just for fun. They're doing it because of other women, for their own sake to find some closure, and you just keep sending these bad legal arguments to kind of make the case fizzle out. We weren't able to include all of that, but that was one thing that made me really frustrated while making it. It was just like legal maneuvering to get the case to disappear. Q. The English title of the film is “An Army of Women.” The symbol “army” is traditionally associated with men or more masculine elements. Why did you choose this title for a story of women fighting the broken criminal justice system? The title was actually from the very first conversation I had with Jenny. We talked on the phone and I asked her something about what is it about this case? Why did you decide to take it? And she said, “ for me, the most powerful thing about this case is that there is an army of women who are working behind the scenes to change things.” She used the term to describe not just the women plaintiffs but also a lot of people like their mothers, their sisters and all of these advocates or activists that were working in Austin to support this change. There were just so many women using their skills and different experiences to push for this change. So she was saying, “the one thing that inspires me and makes me hopeful that we can succeed is that this army of women is not gonna give up. They're just here fighting to change the system.” So that's where it came from and I remember noting it down as the working title of the film. For a long time we had cuts of the film that I felt the title doesn't really match, because I felt like we didn't feel the army. This is before I did interviews with all the women, so I only had Marina and Hannah and Jenny and Elizabeth. I was like, is that an army? I don't know, just four people. But then I did the interviews, we incorporated them. And suddenly I got this feeling that it was bigger than just four people. It was a bigger group. It was not just them, not just Austin, it was everyone. And I was like, okay, it's not just a working title, it is the main title. I have to say, this film has been the most difficult film I've done, but also the most inspirational one, where I see people fight for something and do it for years and years and years. It's a testament to all of their strength that they were able to get those changes. It's really difficult, but they did. I feel very fortunate that I got to see it and witness it and bring this story to Taiwan and other parts of the world.
Q1: The title “What's softest in the world rushes and runs over what's hardest in the world.” taken from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, resonates with the many natural themes of the film. Do you always have an interest in Eastern Cosmology? How did the idea of including Laozi's phrases and water imagery come about? My interest in Eastern Cosmology has grown over the last few years. I've been exploring the relationship between our world and technology, and this book had a profound impact on me. I remember reading it by a lake, which deepened its effect on me. In Taoism and many other cultures, water represents femininity, and I wanted to explore this connection. Life and philosophy are intertwined; there’s no real separation. As we live, we’re connected to a larger cosmology. Showing this relationship was important to me, especially through water, which symbolizes how we flow through life and our connection to the natural world. Nurturing life connects us to the elements and reminds us that we’re not distinct from nature. We aren’t separate from it; we’re part of it. I hope I can apply this wisdom to my life. Hopefully, it makes me wiser. One thing I learned from making this film is the power of presenting a message in a soft yet impactful way, especially in a political context. You can push for change in various ways, and these philosophies remind me that there’s more than one way to communicate an idea. I’d say this outlook has not only shaped the film but also my daily interactions and how I present my work to the world. Q2: Could you elaborate on the core concepts discussed in the film? This is the second part of a project that began with Kin, a film exploring the themes of finding safe spaces and choosing family. In the sequel, What’s Softest, I wanted to delve deeper into the concept of queer families, shifting from simply finding a family to nurturing and sustaining it. That interest in the nurturing aspect is how this project came about. The focus lies in nurturing. I aimed to connect everyday routines with broader, philosophical reflections. Parenthood and nurturing life naturally evoke ideas about existence, life, and death. This film allowed me to explore themes beyond identity, weaving in elements of the natural world and contemplating the wider meanings of care and connection. Q3: You once described “wanting to bring together the different family stories to create a united picture of the community, showing everyone as part of one interconnected group.” How did this concept develop? I wanted to avoid isolating specific identities and voices, so viewers would feel the film as a gathering of different narratives. Creating a communal space within the film was important to me because filmmaking, at its core, is collaborative, it unites various voices. I wanted to emphasize that sense of connection, especially when discussing community gatherings and child-rearing, as raising a child is not an isolated task but requires a supportive, collective effort. Q4: You mentioned that working with other artists brings you closer to a shared vision of a world you collectively hope for. Could you elaborate on what this communal world looks like, both in the film and beyond? In the film, I try to depict this idea through a picnic scene. I organized a gathering and invited all the actors, whether they were parents or not. One of my intentions was to blur the biological definition of parenthood. I wanted to emphasize that the bond between parents and children isn’t defined by blood or legal ties; with enough love and care, anyone can become an important figure in a child's life. Children are our future, and nurturing them is something we can do together, no matter which family they come from, to help them grow and share love and happiness as a community. In Singapore, most queer families are Chinese, partly because there are few queer families overall and because certain religious restrictions can be stricter. Additionally, it's often more financially accessible for the Chinese majority. I made it a point to bring in more people from various ethnic backgrounds to construct a more inclusive queer space. Q5: How did you build a trusting relationship with the families and have them show their softest and most vulnerable parts? Building trust with families is really about genuine communication. I simply get to know them, ask for their consent to show certain moments, and ensure they feel comfortable. I don’t think of it as capturing particularly vulnerable moments; it’s more about everyday life. I believe it’s essential to be transparent with participants about where the film will be shown and who the audience will be, right from the start. I also make it clear to everyone I work with that they have the right to withdraw at any point. This open conversation gives them a sense of freedom and control, so they don’t feel trapped or uncertain about how their image will be used. Additionally, once I create a draft of the film, I share it with them to ensure they feel safe and comfortable with how they are portrayed. This approach helps foster trust and makes them feel secure in sharing and expressing themselves. Ｑ6： The film is crafted in a soft, lyrical style, with poetic visuals that create the feeling of watching a narrative poem. There appear to be many metaphors throughout the film, for example, we saw a child playing with the clay or a snail. Working with clay is a symbolic arrangement that connects to the biblical image of God shaping humans from clay, echoing the way parents mold and guide their children. I wanted to bring this idea into a physical form, where parents can teach their children to explore and shape their own world using simple materials. This activity not only reflects everyday life but also touches on deeper philosophies related to parenthood. It provides a shared experience, allowing the child to explore and understand the world in their own way. About the snail, I believe it's important to nurture forms of life beyond humans, recognizing that, as animals ourselves, we are not uniquely special. Including other animal life allows us to experience a visceral connection to the natural world. I was particularly drawn to filming snails because their slow, vulnerable movement made them easier to capture on film and added an interesting perspective. Snails often evoke childhood memories, I remember observing their shells and gently interacting with them as a child. Snails’ vulnerability also highlights our capacity for both destruction and care. We frequently see snails crushed underfoot simply due to their slowness. Through filming, I wanted to reflect on this duality: while we have the power to harm, we also have the choice to protect and nurture. Q7: The film features many scenes of preparing, eating, and sharing food. What message do you hope to convey through these moments? When I include food in the scene, it’s not just about physical nourishment but also about fostering community and culture. Sharing meals is an essential way to bond, and in many Asian cultures, preparing and eating food is a way to express love. I wanted to capture that in the film. The dishes on the dining table are traditional confinement foods, chosen intentionally to reflect care for the birthing partner. These foods come from different cultures within Singapore, symbolizing the act of preparing and sharing across generations. Ｑ8：Please explain the current state and progress of the queer family movement in Singapore. I think there is a growing awareness and understanding of queer families now. This topic seems to be gaining attention, and comments online indicate general support, though there are, of course, some negative responses. Right now, coverage tends to be slightly left-leaning, not yet reaching the conservative mainstream. If there were a possibility of legislative change, I think we'd see more pushback from those resisting societal shifts. While progress isn’t always straightforward, the world has become more accepting over the past decade, and this trend is visible, especially in parts of Asia. Q9: What's Softest has attended the 2024 Venice Biennale, did you receive any interesting feedback that you would like to share with us? With nearly 300 artists showcasing, and mine placed near the end, receiving thoughtful feedback from viewers who took the time to engage meant a lot to me. One surprising feedback is, how similar the situation is for queer parents in Italy, where they also face a lack of recognition. It highlights the complexity of progress, which goes beyond regional and cultural differences. Even the notion of Western openness is more nuanced and constructed than it seems. I was also moved by the audience's emotional response to the film. Although I don’t believe the emotional impact is the sole measure of good work, it was heartening to know people felt something significant despite the event's overwhelming nature. Q10: When did you first realize your desire to use documentary practice as means of creation, and how did you become deeply engaged with the varied topics? The idea of documenting emerged early on. It all began with a documentary practice program at the university. The professor was a war photographer, taught in a very intense and rigorous environment, emphasizing reportage, essay writing, and documenting real-life stories. At the time, I was studying international relations, which felt very abstract and hierarchical. Documentary work offered a way to connect these broad concepts with intimate human experiences. It allowed me to understand people’s struggles first hand rather than studying politics in a detached manner. Choosing topics that I felt personally invested in was crucial. I needed to feel ownership and a sense of responsibility over the stories I documented. I didn’t want to mimic the practices of some journalists who parachute into communities, cover trendy topics, and then abandon them once the news cycle shifts. That approach didn’t align with my values, which is why I distanced myself from the journalism world. Working as an artist has given me more freedom to dig deep into subjects that matter to me. It's essential for me to really explore the root of the topics I cover. I also felt conflicted about the power dynamics involved, especially since much of my training occurred in the U.S., where stories are often filtered through a Western media lens. For instance, I once presented a project about queer women in Singapore to a U.S. photo editor who dismissed it, saying they had recently published a similar story from another Asian country. This kind of response made me realize that I didn’t want to be constrained by what Western media deemed important. Stepping away from those structures has allowed me to create work on my own terms. Q11: Your work has been exploring how femininity and queerness are articulated. While often delving into daily life and exploring the neglected existence in Singapore’s history and society, how do you come up with the varied topics while keeping them in your structure of creation？ My process is very intuitive and spontaneous, developing step by step without a predetermined path. I believe in having the freedom to explore what truly captivates me, which is essential when committing to a project that can take months or even years to complete. When I work, I focus on what genuinely moves me because I know I’ll be dedicating years to advocating for that idea, representing it, and protecting both the concept and the people involved. It's a mix of cause-driven passion, intellectual curiosity, and personal interest. I listen closely to this internal drive as it shapes my work. Q12: Please introduce the collective project, Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR), that started last year. What is it like collaborating with such talented artists? The project functions both as a platform and a collective, primarily operating on Discord. It’s driven by study groups and channels where members gather around specific topics or books to learn and discuss together. We present in turns, meeting as often as we decide. This setup helps make challenging, theoretical material more accessible. In a group setting, difficult concepts become easier to tackle. This variety supports a holistic approach to world-building in art. Our Discord is full of diverse discussions that intertwine the philosophical and material, offering a vivid picture of our collective exploration. Working with these artists is truly a privilege. The experience is not just intellectually stimulating; it’s personally rewarding. And the best part is getting to call these incredible people my friends. Right now, I’m in a group studying texts by Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui. We recently covered his book Art and Cosmotechnics and are now revisiting his earlier work, The Question of Technology in China. Currently, I’m also part of a group called “Asia as Principle,” which explores the concept of Asia, its origins, and its fluid nature. We discuss how the idea of Asia has evolved and delve into Asian futurism.
Q: What inspired you to make this film? This short film started as a feature film I first wrote when I was in graduate school getting my MFA [Master of Fine Arts degree] in Screenwriting. I wrote three feature films while I was in school, and this was my thesis film. I was inspired to write a film set in my hometown in Racine, Wisconsin, where I grew up with my Filipino immigrant single mother. This was always a story about a mother and daughter that was somewhat based on my own experience. But it's not 100% my childhood. A lot of it is reenacted, yes—but a lot of it is also fictionalized. I was interested in depicting something very culturally specific, because Filipino immigrant society in the Midwestern United States is quite different from other Philippine diaspora communities elsewhere, and even more so than native Filipino communities in the Philippines. I wanted to show the nuances of this society, especially the socio-economic class dynamics between Mercedes, the host of the party—who is obviously very wealthy, along with all of her friends—and Annette, the protagonist, who is a first-time guest. She's a housekeeper. She's not wealthy, and you see how awkward and uncomfortable it is for her to fit in, to assimilate. And yet these characters share an ancestry and cultural heritage, and so they're still trying to find friendship—despite that socio-economic gap—and I think that's very common in Filipino diaspora society too. This was something I was very aware of as a child: the class dynamics. So that also inspired this film. At first, my research was mostly my own memories and personal experience. But then, when I cast the actors—most of whom are either native Filipinos, Filipino immigrants, or second generation Filipinos—we had many workshops and rehearsals in which we discussed our experiences growing up as Filipino. How they were similar, how they were different, sharing perspectives. I found inspiration in their stories, too. So collaboration with actors was also a huge part of the research process: inviting their input, their instincts, their memories, and integrating that into the script. The actors were ultimately responsible for developing their own individual characters. I gave them a skeleton, a structure, but they really fleshed them out. Q. I do notice that you use close-ups of pearl necklaces, lipsticks, and the interior design. The mother, Annette, is really trying to fit into that specific class. Can you share more about the backstory you had in mind for her character? In the feature film, Annette and Mercedes meet at church. They’ve only just met, right before this party. So they don't know each other at all. Annette has recently moved to Wisconsin from New Jersey. And before that, she's from the Philippines. But this is all backstory that you don't need to know to understand the short film. But if we're talking about my personal relationship to this character… I'm very sensitive to these class dynamics because my mother grew up very poor and even though she was able to work her way up the socio-economic ladder, I could always sense that she never really felt like she fit in; even though she eventually became a doctor, and went to school with a lot of students who were from extremely wealthy families, and was later included in that society, I could always sense that she never really felt like she belonged, like we belonged. And so, in a way, this is also part of Annette’s backstory. I also based Annette’s character, in part, on my childhood nanny. I grew up with a nanny who also came from a poor family, and she became part of our family, and we would sometimes take her with us to social gatherings. And that was also very challenging for me as a child: to witness these class and status and power dynamics, when I didn’t even understand what I was witnessing. I remember being as young as seven and observing this, and feeling uncomfortable, but not understanding why I was so uncomfortable. It wasn't until later that I realized what was happening. Whereas Jasmine is 15—old enough to understand. Jasmine resents being forced to perform the role of a good daughter for her mother to impress these people, to help her mother improve her social status. And I think that's why she's so reluctant to participate. She also finds Mercedes and her friends phony, and doesn't trust them. That's what I wanted to depict as well: the child’s sensitivity to—and distrust of—adults who are preoccupied with flaunting their social status, their wealth, and their affluence. Q. We see Annette is using Jasmine to kind of parade her around because Jasmine obviously can sing very well and speaks with a very American accent. But in the meantime, we also see Annette put Jasmine down in the conversations. Can you talk about that? I think this character is extremely critical of herself and of her daughter, and I think she's put her own needs or desires over her daughter’s. She's prioritizing her own image and appearance over her daughter’s. She's more preoccupied with impressing Mercedes and Mercedes’ friends, even at the expense of Jasmine—she's ashamed of her daughter for not speaking the language, for not behaving more typically Filipino. Growing up, I always felt my mother was expecting me to behave in a certain way that I didn't know how to behave—because I wasn't raised in the same culture she was. So there's this tension within a lot of Filipino families, and even within different immigrant families in the US. There's this expectation that the child is everything for the parents, and is responsible for honoring the family, demonstrating the family’s status and identity. I don’t think Jasmine can relate. Not only because she doesn't want to be paraded around by her mother against her will, but she can’t relate to these people because she just can’t connect with them. They talk about her in front of her, as if she’s not there, as if she’s invisible. I found that to be very typical in my experience growing up: my mother and friends talking about me as if I were not in the room, objectifying me. As a child I found that to be disrespectful to me, but no one thinks about giving respect to the child. The focus is always on whether and how the child is giving respect to the elders. Q: There was a scene where Jasmine was bitten by the dog, the timing is brilliantly chosen as well. Can you talk about that? This turning point comes just when Annette is finally welcomed into Mercedes’ world, into this new “family.” Remember, at the beginning of the film, Annette warns Jasmine “you better behave.” And then of course, Jasmine provokes the dog and gets bitten and causes chaos and ruins everything. But at the very end of the film, we have a role reversal: Annette herself loses control and misbehaves. Annette blames her daughter, but it's Annette who pushed Jasmine to the dog, by treating her the way she's treated her. And so, in a way, Annette is ultimately responsible for her daughter's behavior. This climactic moment is a result of and a reaction against everything we've seen so far. It’s also a reaction to the very first 60 seconds of the film, the conversation they have in the car—this aggression and resentment that has been repressed throughout the party. In the end, we see that it's really Annette's reaction that Mercedes is unhappy with. It's not that Jasmine was bitten by the dog; it's how Annette treats Jasmine. That's what ruins it for Annette. It's Annette's own behavior, not Jasmine's. I don't think Jasmine believes her mother when she says “don't touch the dog,” that it’s “dangerous.” I remember being told dogs were dangerous by my mom as a kid. She has a fear of dogs because, culturally, where she grew up, dogs were perceived as dangerous; whereas where I grew up, dogs were perceived as friendly. So that's yet another cultural conflict embedded in the film. Q. Like how the dog as a notion is culturally very different for Annette and Jasmine, will you say that in the beginning, where they were arguing about putting on lipstick and locking the car, that also similarly comes from a place where, because Annette grows up in a different environment, where not locking the door would lead to consequences? Yes, absolutely. I think her perspective is a very common immigrant perspective: the survivalist mentality, especially if one has come from more humble beginnings. There's this kind of scarcity mentality—a fear-based approach to the world—as opposed to being more trusting and open. And telling her daughter to put on lipstick to look nice—I think that's also very culturally specific, because a woman has to look a certain way to be publicly presentable in traditional Filipino culture: wearing a dress, putting on lipstick, and looking like a traditional woman. There's a feminist critique there: Jasmine is rebelling against this, because she's grown up in an environment in which these are not the same values, in which a woman or girl can go out in public without makeup and in pants and still “look nice.” So that’s yet another cultural conflict between the mother and the daughter—their conflicting perceptions of femininity and respectability, as well as their conflicting perceptions of danger and safety. Q: The film title is “Myself When I Am Real.” Can you elaborate on its meaning? I was very interested in this contrast between private and public self-image. There are times even when Annette is in public, when all of the characters are together, when they're not aware they're being filmed. They might be aware that other people are watching them because of course, their eyes are open. But I think because of the nature of the camera—the intimacy and access of the home movie—there are moments in which they're not aware that they're being filmed, unaware that they're being observed and examined, and that's interesting to me too. We see Annette being “real” only in private. We see this first at the beginning of the film, once in the middle, and again at the very end. In the beginning, no one is looking—which is why we can't see the image, we can only hear dialogue. Then in the middle, we see her in the bathroom, trying on Mercedes’ perfume and jewelry, and imagining that she could be Mercedes too. And finally at the end, we see her real self revealed once more when she loses her temper with her daughter. She thinks she's in private and no one's watching, and that's when we expose the true nature and quality of their relationship—what it's like behind closed doors, when no one is looking. This is what the film is about. Q. Can you tell us about the food in the film? Depicting the cultural specificity of the Filipino American gathering was very important for me: whether details like particular dishes that are traditionally served at a party; or eating with the fork and spoon; or the fact that they're all dressed up in diamonds and pearls but still using paper towels as napkins and talking while chewing, unconcerned with table manners… All these specific little details helped me portray a certain kind of character I wanted to explore: the bourgeois midwestern Filipino immigrant. Some of these are hyperspecific details that maybe only Fil-Am kids will pick up on, but that's what it’s meant to communicate. I wanted to highlight the contrast between this performed elegance and opulence, and the realness of everyday life. I wanted to invite the audience to examine the cracks in this façade, to look behind-the-scenes, behind the performance. And the dinner sequence helped me to do this. Q. During the making of this film, you get a chance to revisit your childhood, your upbringing. Do you start to see things differently? Yes, I found it to be a very therapeutic experience. I now understand why my mom is the way she is; I have more empathy for her, having written a character [Annette] that is, in part, based on her. I can now understand her thought process, and what led her to behave the way she would behave. And so I feel like I now have so much more empathy and understanding for her and her friends—the people I grew up around. Whereas as a teenager, I maybe resented them; I now have empathy for Mercedes' character, and for all of the characters. I love them all. And I also now see Jasmine's character—who's somewhat based on the teenage me—as kind of a spoiled brat! Maybe not intentionally a brat, but she's just not culturally sensitive; she doesn't have the vocabulary, or the perspective, the maturity, to be able to navigate such a complex and sophisticated social environment. Because how could she? She’s a child. Q. This film recreates a very specific cultural setting, how are the international audience taking it? Based on the Q&A the other day, it seemed like the audience was still able to relate to the story because of the questions they were asking, and I could hear where there was laughter, or where there was some kind of vocal response—that not only were they following the story, but they were having a similar kind of universal reaction, even though it's maybe not their personal experience. But I've actually been told by other children of immigrants—and even non-immigrant Americans—that the family and class and intergenerational dynamics are relatable, regardless of the cultural specificity of the film. For example, people have come up to me after screenings and said, “I'm half Colombian half Nigerian, and this is exactly what it's like at my family gatherings,” or “I'm a Jewish New Yorker, and this is what it's like at Thanksgiving.” So I do think there is something universal about the relationship between parents and children, and these conflicting class dynamics. But the film is still very specific to an Asian cultural context: filial piety, honoring your parents, no disrespect, resigned obedience and habitual self-sacrifice. I'm very happy to hear that it's relatable and that it resonates with a diversity of viewers, especially Asian and Filipino viewers. Growing up, I never felt like I really found a community. Because I'm multiracial, because I'm second generation, because I'm not fluent in the language, I never felt like I was Filipino enough… Yet I was never fully Americanized, being this “third culture,” not entirely fitting in one or the other… And so it's very meaningful to me that through this film, I've created something [a community] to which now I feel like I belong. I hope people resonate with it and I'm not alone in my experience, because I was very lonely for a very long time, and even second generation Filipino immigrant culture in the States can recreate this same socio-economic class dynamic—even my generation, children of the diaspora can recreate those same oppressive social hierarchies that seem antiquated and irrelevant. And this is why I said I can relate more to Annette’s character after having written this film, because I've also been in her position: the outsider looking in, even today, as a privileged, American-born-and-raised, code-switching millennial. You don’t have to be Filipino to relate to the characters, although maybe Filipinos and Asians can relate a little bit more. I'm very happy that it's relatable, and that it's not uniquely my experience, but a universal experience. Because it feels good to share.
Q1：Blue ID is your first feature film which you spent ten years filming. Could you elaborate on how you embarked on this journey? Blue ID is a film I co-directed with Burcu Melekoglu. When I first met Rüzgar, he was about 17 years old. We have been close friends for years, and both Burcu and I were the first people he came out to as a trans person. 12 years ago, we used to help him search for information about the gender affirmation process. Since Rüzgar doesn't speak English and there were no resources in Turkish back then, Burcu and I translated whatever information we could find for him, most of it was from North America. At one point, Rüzgar suggested that we document his journey. He thought that perhaps, years later, he might feel comfortable sharing it, and maybe we could create a film to help people in Turkey who have no access to resources on this topic. Filming alone took about six years, followed by a two-year break, and another two years in editing. Q2： What was on your mind when Rüzgar first approached you with this idea? Given that he's such a close friend, how did you navigate through your roles both as friend and co-director? It started as something between friends, we weren’t initially thinking about a full feature film—we were just there with him, experiencing the process alongside him. Burcu and I have a background in filmmaking, but this didn’t start as a professional project. It was more playful, like, “How could this moment be a scene? Let’s just capture it this way.” We simply set up the camera and filmed as things happened, without planning a full production. But about six months later, his doctor leaked his story to the press. At that point, we realized we needed to approach it as a professional film, and that’s how it evolved. Navigating our roles as both friends and filmmakers was tricky. To be honest, we were there as friends first, with the director role only coming into play during editing. When Rüzgar had to hide from the press, he stayed at Burcu's place, and we all lived together—Burcu, me, Rüzgar, and another close friend. We became his main support system. Throughout the process, we prioritized being friends over filmmakers, constantly checking in with Rüzgar and getting his consent on everything we filmed, by doing so, there weren’t disagreements. Rüzgar is the first visible transmasculine person in Turkey, so none of us knew what to expect. We trusted our instincts, capturing the moments we felt mattered while supporting him as he navigated uncharted territory, facing whatever challenges came our way. Q3： What were the major challenges you encountered while making this film? Given the film's significant media exposure and societal attention, Rüzgar repeatedly expressed concern about his safety. Was safety also a concern for the filming team? It wasn’t that making an LGBTQ+ film or being LGBTQ+ was illegal or caused issues for us directly in that sense. The real difficulty came from him being constantly harassed and followed by the media and paparazzi. It was awkward and uncomfortable, especially when the press crowded his place, and we couldn’t move freely, filming him became a huge challenge for us. Following him with a professional camera was nearly impossible. So, we decided to capture moments as they happened, instead of planning scenes, we were just being there with him, capturing life as it unfolded. Speaking of Rüzgar’s safety issue, our concerns were more about him, being the first visible trans man in Turkey, and not knowing what kind of reaction he might face. I didn’t feel unsafe, and I don’t think Burcu did either. But I understand Rüzgar’s concerns. Social media can be harsh—back then, just like today. People say whatever they think and often feel entitled to comment on others’ lives. So, while there was a lot of support, it’s understandable that the negative voices were loud and overwhelming, making it easy to feel under threat. Q4: Were there also supportive voices that emerged? What is the most important way to show support? On Twitter, many fans of Rüzgar showed their support, focusing on him as a person rather than his gender. Some actors and directors also voiced their encouragement, and his former manager, who appears in the film, showed up to support him after hearing what he was going through. These supportive voices made a big difference. For us, the best way to support him was simply by being there, none of us knew how to handle a situation like this. Professionally, it would have helped to have a PR team to guide us through the media storm, but ultimately, being there for him in a personal way was the most meaningful support we could offer. We spent time together, listening to music, hosting house parties, and watching films—moments that allowed him to unwind and provided some relief from the constant stress. Q5.：In the latter part of the film, Rüzgar's gender transition receives official recognition, successfully changing his Pink ID to Blue ID. A few years later Turkey changed its ID cards completely to plain ones. Can you elaborate on the social backdrop for us? Would you say that Turkey in 2024 is a more accepting time for queer communities? Over the past decade, we’ve experienced a significant rollback of rights. Legally, we may have protections, but in practice, they are being undermined, and a pervasive, dark propaganda campaign targeting LGBTQ+ individuals is happening. Thankfully the community remains resilient. People continue to protest and take to the streets, refusing to hide in fear. Despite the setbacks, the spirit of resistance is strong. It’s not only LGBTQ+ rights that are under attack—women’s rights are also being eroded, and patriarchal forces are rising globally. A major shift is how confrontational activism has become. Pride marches used to carry a sense of celebration alongside protest, even if they were not like the big party parades in places like New York. Now, they are met with police resistance, and being visible in public has become far more dangerous. Still, the movement persists. NGOs, activists, and outspoken public figures continue to fight for LGBTQ+ rights despite mounting pressure. In 2024, Turkey is far from being an accepting environment for queer communities. Government propaganda is relentless, filled with hate speech that targets LGBTQ+ people, even absurdly blaming them for the COVID pandemic. This vitriol comes from the highest levels of authority, fostering an atmosphere of hostility. Confronting these challenges, the focus is on solidarity. The community supports one another not only emotionally but also economically, forming a strong and effective network. Their unity is essential, providing protection and upliftment. Even under immense pressure, the LGBTQ+ community continues to do what needs to be done to survive and resist. Q6：Could you share your observations on how Rüzgar's mindset shifts from a desire for privacy at the beginning to a willingness to speak up and represent the queer community? Through his public gender transition, although Rüzgar never intended to become a spokesperson for transgender rights, he inevitably became an influential cultural symbol within the queer community. Today, young people in Turkey say, "I am like Rüzgar" to express their gender identity. Initially, he wanted nothing more than to live a peaceful, ordinary life without drawing attention. This is a common wish among many trans individuals who prefer not to be seen as activists. However, being forcibly outed and enduring tremendous public scrutiny left Rüzgar with no choice but to confront and ultimately embrace his visibility. Even now, Rüzgar has not become an active advocate but has chosen to live as a transgender man under public attention, and the queer community in Turkey understands and respects this. His openness alone is already profoundly meaningful and impactful. While his authenticity on platforms like Instagram, where he and his influencer wife share their life, his openness alone has created a profoundly meaningful impact. It’s inspiring to witness how he has reclaimed his narrative and strength. Q7: Many footages were shot by Rüzgar himself using his phone. These raw, intimate monologues captured his feelings and struggles authentically. How did these personal videos come about? And how did you decide which footage to include? Documenting his experiences through video diaries was something Rüzgar had already been doing. It’s actually a common practice among many trans individuals. We didn’t suggest it; we were already collaborating on the film, and he was recording these moments independently. Sometimes he even filmed with the project in mind, capturing moments that could be included even if we weren’t there with him. Our main focus throughout the film was always the trans audience. We wanted to portray Rüzgar’s experience in a way that made them feel understood and less alone because transitioning is a profoundly complex process—both medically and psychologically, marked by ups and downs, confusion, and concerns. It was important for us to validate those feelings, and Rüzgar felt safe enough with us to share this side of himself. That trust enabled us to use his personal footage, which ultimately made the story resonate deeply, especially with trans viewers. The film powerfully conveys the community's solidarity and shared sense of experience. Choosing which footage to include was a long and difficult process. We had nearly 300 hours of material since filming took six years. As we secured more funding, we filmed some stunning professional scenes. Yet, in the end, we chose not to use them. This was one of the hardest decisions we had to make. We spent two years editing, going through multiple cuts that didn’t feel right until we decided to focus on the home videos. Using Rüzgar’s phone footage allowed us to authentically capture his struggles and maintain the film’s genuine intimacy. Our friendship was also a crucial part of the story. The film wouldn’t exist without that bond, and we wanted the audience to sense it. Q8: If it weren't for the dedication and persistence in documenting this journey over a decade, this film wouldn't have come to life. We would have missed the chance to share both the profound struggles and the triumphant moments of his experience. Has your relationship with Rüzgar evolved over these ten years of filming? What matters most is to recognize that while the journey was undoubtedly difficult, it was also filled with hope and growth. Reflecting on the past decade, our relationship with Rüzgar has definitely evolved. As he has become more at peace with himself, our bond has also transformed. It feels more relaxed now, less urgent or crisis-driven. We’ve always had fun together, but this chapter is different—it feels lighter and more joyful, as we are both able to enjoy each other’s company without the weight of constant struggle. It’s a new era for him, and that has brought a beautiful, calm energy to our friendship. Q9: Now looking back, what does it mean to you as a team to make this film? That's a really meaningful question. Creating this film holds deep significance for us because it wasn't just about Rüzgar’s journey; it became our journey as well. As members of the queer community, we've witnessed so many changes and challenges in Turkey over the past 10 years. Making this film gave us purpose and a way to stay strong, even during difficult times. It created a powerful sense of connection to our community, driving us forward with resilience and hope.
Interview with Milisuthando BONGELA, director of Milisuthando Ｑ：What is the motivation of making this film? There's two stories that I like to reflect on when telling the story of how the film began. The first one was in 2014 when I went out to breakfast with my friend and I'd had natural hair for a long time. And Instagram was new. It was about 2013, 2012 and people were getting on Instagram and I felt a lot of pressure to change my look from my natural hair to a more Instagram kind of look with straight hair and long nails. I remember telling my friend this and he got so upset with me. He was like, why would you do that? He started mentioning my racial identity. We had a big argument about this because I was like, what has race got to do with any of the way I want to look? And he started mentioning apartheid and oppression and all these things. I went home to research black identity and hair. And I just dived into a rabbit hole where I really learned about the history of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid and how the way that black people look is exactly the reason why our physical attributes have been imbued with these different meanings that makes us seem as if we're inferior compared to other races. And so that was the one side of it. But the story came back to me again in 2013, 2014, when Nelson Mandela died and we had to go to his funeral with my friends. We were singing different anti-apartheid struggle songs to honor him. There was one song called “My Mother Was a Kitchen Girl, My Father Was a Garden Boy.” I remember going, yes, I grew up in apartheid. Yes, I'm black. Yes, that black people were oppressed. But I came from another kind of place where there was a bit of a nice childhood and I didn't have white people in my childhood. I didn't really understand apartheid or know it. So it became an exploration of trying to understand what my personal history was and why I had not realized that I'm black for such a long time. It's been a 10-year project of self-exploration, but it's also been a project of understanding my identity through my country: Transkei and South Africa. I feel like many people in our country or in the world did not know about Transkei. It also became a project about how do I love myself? Because I've been raised in a world, on one hand, quite sheltered and ignorant, and on the other, very much not loving myself as a black person. I had to face that. Ｑ：The film utilizes a lot of archival footage, how do you choose the images? I didn't want in this film representations of apartheid as we've seen it before. Apartheid was violent. But I was more interested in how does it become violent? If the last step is violence, what is the first step? I was interested in the mentality that creates racism and maintains it. Concerning the archival footage, first of all, I wanted it in color and more domestic. More images of women, more images at homes, and different gestures of power and how they function in public life as well as private life. I also wanted to turn the gaze on white people and whiteness during apartheid. We found all these incredible images online. We were also given some footage by someone who used to be a cameraman during apartheid and he had loads of footage of apartheid that's never been seen before. It became more complex because you imagine that people who are oppressors are going to be always holding guns, but they're not. They're living their lives. I wanted images that represented an alternative perspective on the quiet violence of power. And I wanted to make it more feminine. I feel like the perspectives of the men facing each other with guns and the police and all those things, it's a very masculine understanding of apartheid. But what were the women doing? Ｑ：In different chapters, many sequences touch upon the idea of ritual, either it is related to indigenous knowledge system or personal ritual. Can you elaborate on the role of rituals in this film journey? We wouldn't have done any of this without the backing and the support and the knowledge systems that I come from in Southern Africa. Bantu philosophy, I would have never been able to achieve any of this. First of all, just the confidence to make a film. It felt to me like my ancestors had sent me on a mission, because they themselves were artists. I come from people who are writers and musicians and people who are interested in the form of art. Obviously, because black people weren't allowed to make films for a very long time. And I feel like they said, go and do this and we will help you. And in so doing, you will resurrect us and change the ways in which we were suppressed and couldn't make films. So that was just the personal backing that I had. I always knew that I had the support, but also what do they want to say through this medium. Rituals are normal where I come from. It's part of my life. I wanted to invite the audience to know that this is how we understand existence. This is how we interact with nature, time and space. There are Christianity, indigenous knowledge systems, and African cosmologies that came together in the film because they come together in my life. Also, I wanted to reflect on how one understand racism from a spiritual perspective. In my own life, this is how I was working it out. What I did was turn the camera on myself and invite the audiences into that process, to unveil complexify of how these things live inside of them as well. We also did rituals when, for instance, we found some of the archive that was very, very difficult to look at. We cleanse ourselves after that. Because a lot of the times you can watch this archive and it can make you very upset. And you can then take that anger and put it in the cut. And what you do is that you're transferring that energy onto whoever's watching. And so we had to be very careful about how not to do that. And this we did through cleansings and rituals. And I had healers. I had indigenous healers here who were helping me throughout the process. Again, it's a matter of just sharing with the audiences that this is how we live. Ｑ：Marion, who is your producer of this film, also appeared on screen. Can you elaborate on the choice of including this section? Also why the black screen, with only audio available for the audience to navigate? It's a reflection on how we put on screen the questions that I have in my mind about the complexities of these relationships. The questions are: can we be friends with these histories that we hold? Can we be friends if the power dynamics between us are, on one hand, we're friends, we get along. But deep down, power in my body is different from power in a white body. How do we reconcile that? I knew we couldn't avoid this question. When we were still at the fundraising stage, we can't avoid our dynamic. She's the white producer and I'm the black director, which is something that always happens in Southern Africa. It's a pairing that I feel needs to be questioned and needs to open up the discussion. We need to be a little bit more honest about who gets to be what. We knew we couldn't avoid how our relationship affects the way we make film. We know that there's good elements that have allowed us to make film, but we also knew that there's an underside to that. This was the biggest challenge. The whole film was to reflect something that I'm holding and questions that I'm interested in, in a way that provokes people, in a way that engages people where they are with the subject. Whenever we put my images and her images on screen, we knew something happened, something made me uncomfortable. Something in me is just going to be defensive and I'm not going to listen. So we were trying to figure out how we're going to get people listen with something that is either make them uncomfortable, angry, or make them connect with these people. The decision to take away the picture was to invite the audience into the space that functioned as a confessional where I was busy exposing myself and my own vulnerability around this. And my friend too was exposing herself. Also, how much do we throw it back to the audience so that they know that this is not a passive exercise? We're not just talking about me and Marianne, Bettina or Jess. This is not a thing relevant to these particular people. This happens everywhere in the world. The black is also about a comment on cinema and how cinema has not really dealt with race from the perspective of black Africans and black women who are victims of it and who haven't been allowed to really participate in filmmaking for a very long time, at least in Southern Africa. Taking away the light is also commenting on how you cinematically represent these things. Racism is not going to be solved by black people sitting alone. It's also not going to be solved by white people sitting alone. We have to figure out how to have conversations. And right now, I feel like we're still far from resolving these things. So we were just trying to figure out cinematic techniques to deal with a subject that many people can relate to. Ｑ：Have you changed how you perceive your self-identity or relationship with your personal history as well as the collective history after making this film? This film has absolutely changed me. It has been the most incredible privilege to make it because I got to truly deep dive and in so doing, create a form of inviting the world to understand what exists in a part of the world that's usually filmed or told by outsiders or foreigners. We hardly have stories where people are really reflecting themselves. When I finished the last cut, I was sitting by myself in a cinema watching the whole film. And I remember crying so much, thinking this is the first time that I feel like a girl like me has been represented in her fullness and her complexity in a film. This film has absolutely changed my relationship to my identity and myself. I have come to love myself a lot more genuinely, not relying on outside love. Ｑ：Do you have any words for the Taiwanese audiences? What I'd love to share with the Taiwanese audience is that actually Taiwan was one of the few countries that recognized Transkei next to Israel in the 70s. I think you should do some research to learn how it happened to be like that. That was very interesting. Also, I would love for audiences there to think about it in relation to the things that they are facing right now. Regarding national identity, regarding self-determination, regarding the boundaries and borders, regarding being recognized and not being recognized. How these questions live next to the questions of what it means to be a human being today? Also to find themselves and find characters that they can relate to in the film.
