“Tell That to the Winter Sea” is a masterfully crafted journey into womanhood, filled with captivating performances, stunning visuals and assured direction. The film brings me back to being a pre-teen and teenager by insightfully exploring the bond between girls when they are creating something in the world. “Tell that to the Winter Sea” brings that magic to the screen, while showing us what it looks like when the girls who came of age together meet years later into womanhood. The colors, beautiful sea scapes, sunrises, and sharp script come together in a way that is breathtaking. The film is about a bride-to-be, Jo (Greta Bellamacina), who invites her childhood friend and first love Scarlet (Amber Anderson) to her hen party. They have not seen each other in a decade. It’s a beautiful film about the unspoken language of female friendship.
The film will be in select UK Cinemas starting on May 31st, and available to buy & rent on digital on July 1st on all major platforms, before premiering on Amazon Prime Video Direct on July 29th. It stars Greta Bellamacina, Amber Anderson, Tamsin Egerton, Jessica Plummer, Bebe Cave and Josette Simon, and is directed by Jaclyn Bethany. I was so happy to talk to director/co-writer Jaclyn Bethany and co-writer/star Greta Bellamacina about this film. It is a must see, and ranks among the top ten films I have seen so far this year.
Can you talk about how you two came together on this project as cowriters? What was the inspiration for this story?
Jaclyn Bethany (JB): Greta and I have known each other as friends for over a decade. We met in London because we have mutual friends. She ended up coming to visit me in New York, and we had so many crossover interests. We were a little bit younger, so we were just figuring ourselves out at the time. But we stayed in touch and supported each other when we started making films. Greta and I made our first features around the same time, and we had small parts in each other’s projects.
I was at AFI, so I was trying to figure out where I would be based, and then the pandemic happened. Because everything had slowed down, that period of time made you think about what you really wanted to do, who you really wanted to work with as an artist, and what you were most interested in making and the kind of stories you wanted to tell. So it sort of made sense at that time that Greta and I do something together.
We started writing, and Greta moved to that house that was the setting for the film. I felt honored that we were able to make the movie there. We started writing, and because of the time difference, which is still challenging now, we would have a 24-hour window. So when I was asleep, she would write and edit, and visa versa. Then we’d talk in the interim.
Greta Bellamacina (GB): Going back to what Jaclyn said, having this decade of friendship led us to be a part of each other’s projects over that period of time, which was during our twenties when we were just trying to figure things out. We experimented a lot, we made short films together that I acted in and had written. Like she said, we’ve both been a part of each other’s debut features. I think we wanted to write something about female friendship because we both had come to a part in our lives when entering your thirties almost becomes a second coming of a age.
There’s a whole other backlog of things that you’re still coming to terms with, and you’re seeing your friends at this precipice of their new lives. People have moved away, people have changed, they’ve had children, they’ve gotten married, people have died. So it’s kind of like a second coming of age when you’ve reached your thirties and you’ve had all of that time to figure things out. At the time when we were discussing making this film together, I had just made a feature film in Italy with an Italian director who uses a lot of physical theater in his work. So the film that I made told it story predominately through dance and movement.
After making that project, I was very inspired by what you can say without saying anything, but by speaking through movement. I guess it was something that Jaclyn, having come from a dance background, had always loved as well. So it felt kind of interesting to see if we could say something with a movement narrative, and have those really kind of intense moments with the characters, without saying anything, but just having the bodies do the talking.
Can you talk about the choice of just having an all female cast on the screen?
JB: I think that was one of the first things that we decided, frankly, because there really aren’t that many projects that do this. It shouldn’t be seen as a risk or some incredibly bold choice. I think often times, and we kind of veered away from this, when you think of a bachelorette party or a group of women together, it’s like a horror movie, or it’s something like “Mean Girls.” As we were discussing ideas, it sort of moved into something more intimate, tender and poetic.
GB: There is this pretense that when these women come together, they are the stereotypical bitches, and they are this backhanded thing. We wanted for instance the character Jade, played by Tamsin Egerton to be a reformed bully who is now, ten years later, actually really nice. She is sort of a different person, and is really empathetic. The women that you grow up having those intense friendships with kind of haunt you because you can’t help who you were in the past. You were just the person you were at that time. It doesn’t matter who you become, there is that sort of innocent child in you that lives on. I think women are able to have incredible friendships like that. Naturally, I think the idea of a hen party seems really antiquated and kind of old fashioned. There is something that I think is kind of evolving in that setting. I think most of the time, women do just want to support each other, and it was important for us to just show that.
JB: And a hen party is a reunion too, of sorts, where groups of women can get together.
I love your cast! Can you talk about your casting process.
GB: With Amber, we had become friends, and we had a lot of mutual friends in common. She was aware of my recent projects with Jaclyn, and I think she was very intrigued in doing something independent, for which there are not many opportunities to do. I just sent her the script to read as a friend, and she messaged me back right away saying, “I want to be a part of this.” I guess her enthusiasm from the beginning was due to it being an independent project, and she seemed totally right for the character.
We worked with a casting agent called Jemima McWilliams, and she had loads of amazing, fantastic ideas. Jessica Plummer came from her, and Jaclyn was quite pivotal in those decisions.
JB: Amber was a great foil to Greta, and I mean that in a positive way. We went a different direction than “Persona” or films that pit women against each other in how we cast two women in these roles who are physically similar.
Amber was very committed to the role, and it was amazing. The film, for me, is divided into three different parts. It’s the narrative of them first at the house, and then a series of flashbacks throughout the film before all of the women come together. You see how Scarlet and Jo change throughout the course of all of those moments, and I think Amber and Greta played all of that really beautifully and distinctively together. The cast was a combination of Greta, Jemima and my ideas, and we were lucky that they were all down to do it. It was really fun.
It’s always interesting when something takes place in real time, not months or years or days, but literally over two nights. Not all of them knew each other, and I think that’s okay because it was that feeling of coming together after ten years or so.
Talk to me about integrating dance into the film.
GB: I think it all started when we were writing the film. We wanted to keep the innocence of these characters because it’s shown in the present day, and it was important to not sexualize it. The dances become open to interpretation, which causes there to be much more of an emotive reason behind them as well. They provoke an innocence and a nostalgia. We sort of instinctively as teenagers try to come to terms with our bodies and start to discover music, and that was another aspect to it. We had Tess Parks who did the soundtrack and we wanted it to be set in the late nineties, conveying that kind of grunge and the sense of being in your own made up world, making up dances and having big dreams.
Then, of course, it’s a simple story, in a way. I just like the idea that the physical dances come from unspoken truths. And it was really nice because it was a way for Amber and me to really get into character. I think we had a handful of sessions to learn these dances. It became really nice because when we started filming, we had this kind of unspoken language together, this physical thing. It kind of gave us our own connection, and made us feel comfortable on that first day filming. When Jaclyn said, “action,” it didn’t feel too scary.
Can you talk about the music, and using songs by Tess Parks for the soundtrack?
JB: Tess was a friend of Greta’s. We wanted there to be the same cohesive soundtrack by one artist throughout it that felt very much rooted in nostalgia, dreaminess and a feminine energy as well. And we wanted the sort of music you would listen to as a teenager in the late nineties, but not super recognizable pop songs that take you out of the film. Tess has this amazing kind of sound. A lot of the music was songs of hers that had already been released, but they were just drafts and versions of them so they were from her recording process, which was kind of interesting. And I think it came out beautifully. It wasn’t even the music that the dances were choreographed to, so it was amazing how well her music fit.
Can you talk about the pastel-like colors of the film and working again with your DP Irene Gomez-Emilsson?
JB: I think the place lent itself to those colors. I had never been in the countryside in the UK during the summer, only in London. That time is so magical because you have those gorgeous mornings and sunsets and it’s still warm enough. Irene is really interesting because she is someone who, as a cinematographer, is very visual but also very intellectual and precise in the way that she shoots. I think you can feel that within this film through the colors, the color palette, even the colors of the house. Greta and I would do mood boards, and we would just share them, such as film references like “My Summer of Love,” and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” We wanted that feel of those beautiful pastel films from a different time. But it also feels timeless, in a sense.
GB: Even though this film is told in real time, it is actually mostly about them growing up. I like the idea that there is a nostalgic feeling throughout the entire thing, even though it kind of keeps it in this sort of broken world that seems disconnected from reality. It is kind of hard to share what we feel, but in a way, the colors of the film feel like a visual representation of that.
JB: Another thing to note is that the flashbacks are brighter and more vibrant than the present day scenes because that is how they were experiencing them. That was a choice we made with color. And the present is sort of more muted.
What do you hope people see in your film?
GB: I hope that they see a simple story but with real human emotions. I feel like we kind of lost touch with this sense of ourselves. Relationships, big or small, are the big things in our lives, nothing really pauses. Life is about relationships and friendships, and that’s enough. I think that those kind of things are the stories to tell sometimes. So yeah, the simplicity of it, I think, hopefully will connect to people in a human way. That’s what I hope.
JB: I think this film is universal, especially for women. As a woman, you could relate to any of these women onscreen. They are all at different phases of their lives, and I think that plays on the complexity of being a woman, the feelings that you feel during transitional moments, and how you support each other. And there also is a bit of letting go and moving on. We can all recognize these parts in ourselves through all of these women, and I hope that is also something people take away.
