It’s a special kind of thrill when the greatness of an emerging filmmaker’s work hits you like a thunderbolt. That’s precisely what happened to me upon discovering the sublimely nuanced and quietly shattering artistry of writer/director Giovanna Molina, whose indelibly haunting shorts “Deer Girl” and “Hickey” screened as part of the Cinema Femme Short Film Festival. “Hickey” was such a harrowing depiction of the repression and abuse endured by teenage sisters in their Evangelical Christian community that I was all the more disarmed by the humor and tenderness in Molina’s most recent short, “Quaker,” which premiered last year at Berlinale.
Taking place during the final meeting at their Quaker high school, a group of Brooklyn seniors take turns sharing their thoughts about their time together. Their words are overwhelmingly positive until one of their peers, Celina (Cecilia Rene), stands up and detonates a verbal explosive, calling out everyone for what she perceives to be their falseness and hypocrisy. What happens next may not be what you expect.
The online release this morning of “Quaker” on the Short of the Week site is sure to entice viewers for Molina’s upcoming feature debut, “Kismet,” which she plans to start shooting this September on Fire Island. Though its cast has yet to be officially announced, its premise promises to take the provocative themes of Molina’s previous work to an even deeper level. The film centers on a young girl, Stella, who is so distraught by her parents’ divorce that she shifts her attention toward communicating with aliens. When these supposedly otherworldly life forms encourage her to plunge into the icy ocean, she returns to land insisting that she is now an alien named Kismet, with no memory at all of Stella’s past life. As Molina notes in our conversation that follows, “strange things come out of the ocean all the time.”
It was a joy speaking with one of my new favorite filmmakers for Cinema Femme about the personal roots of “Quaker,” her eagerly awaited leap into feature filmmaking, and the intriguing ways in which the theme of transcendence has recurred throughout her work.
According to the ever-infallible IMDb, your first credited directorial work is the 2019 short, “Chasing Eden.” Is this true?
Yes, that film was my undergraduate thesis. Before that, I had made some smaller films by myself, but that was the first one that I made with a crew. I was the director of photography for it as well. It was something that I was really proud of at the time, though I haven’t actually watched it in quite a while. What’s interesting about it is it was the film that made me realize how much I enjoy narrative directing, and that I wanted to keep doing it in order to pursue an MFA. I was going to school at Johns Hopkins for creative writing, but they also have an amazing film program. A lot of the Baltimore scene is veering towards experimental DIY film, which was a huge inspiration, but I decided to continue on the narrative track once I made that film.
The one-line synopsis for “Chasing Eden”—women use water as a portal to disappear from the men in their lives—immediately leapt out at me in how it connects with a recurring theme I have observed in your work. A number of your main characters share an urgent need to somehow escape their surroundings in a way that is cosmic. This desire is beautifully articulated toward the end of “Quaker” by a young woman, Caroline (Caroline Campos), who expresses her wish to disappear, an idea that is visualized in the extraordinary final moments of “Hickey.”
It’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. When I was making “Chasing Eden,” I had been taking a class where we were watching a lot of Maya Deren films, such as “At Land” and “Meshes of the Afternoon.” I am inspired by how there seems to be a very strong connection between the ocean and moving between worlds in her work—especially “At Land”— and I was thinking about that a lot when making “Chasing Eden.” Maybe it was derivative of Maya’s films at the time, but it has become an important theme in my work. You see it at the end of “Hickey” when the girl disappears off the trampoline. As young women, we’re often put into situations that are impossible for us to understand in a normal plane of existence. We need to access some sort of other feeling in order to escape them and transcend the trauma.
That was where I went with “Hickey.” “Quaker” is a much more grounded film, but it does talk about that feeling of wanting to disappear—not die, but to kind of cease to exist in the current moment. For “Kismet,” there is a direct water connection where the main character basically becomes an alien after she goes into the ocean, which is actually a portal. When she’s rescued from being in the ocean, she looks exactly the same, yet her transformation into an alien enables her to transcended her human depression. I spent a lot of time on Fire Island growing up, and I think the ocean has always been such an important part of me. That may sound “hokey California,” but this is in New York. [laughs] Because I spent a lot of time swimming in the ocean as a kid, I really associate it with a sense of freedom.
From a young age, I’ve always wanted to be a writer and film kind of came more naturally to me, by mistake. I was always interested in trying to tell stories that I didn’t necessarily experience firsthand. There was a lot of research that went into making “Hickey,” which is about a world that I didn’t grow up in. But in order to personalize it, I put a lot of my feelings about girlhood into the ethos of the film and its characters’ relationships. I did, however, grow up going to a Quaker school, and since I had been thinking a lot about it, I figured, ‘Why don’t I investigate this a little bit more?’ I found that making a film that was so close to home felt much more natural and easier. It’s gotten me to start investigating whether I should be making films that are closer to my own experience.
And yet, as someone with previous experience in the Evangelical Christian community, I can attest that every frame of “Hickey” rings true.
I interviewed a lot of women who had grown up in a similar situation, not always to the extent that we see in the film. Some did attend “purity balls,” some didn’t have them, but they definitely attended youth group. In regard to the scene where the youth group leader uses a cup of a water as a metaphor for those who stray from abstinence, there are so many different versions of that kind of demonstration. The film incorporated many things I had heard that actually happened, and from there, I tried to figure out how to make it work as a story. The research was such an important part of making this film because I wanted it to feel really personal. The characters needed to register as human as opposed to sensationalist tropes that we didn’t really understand. The entire purity movement that the film explores started in the 80s with Reagan putting more money towards abstinence funding. It may feel very antiquated, but it’s actually very new.
The ending of “Hickey” came to me later in the process. I always knew that I wanted the trampoline to be present in the film because I associate that with being young and hanging out. I feel like you see that in a lot of female filmmakers’ work, where the trampoline is portrayed as a place for girlhood. As I was writing the script, I always had an impulse to go towards something that is a bit more surreal. It’s the kind of thing that often can’t be scripted, but rather, comes to you naturally. The feeling of transcendence and the idea of wanting to get out was something that I had always wanted to convey.
As you know, it is harder to program a longer film in festivals. “Hickey” was 20 minutes long, and some people were telling me to actually cut out that last scene. By doing this, the film ended with the girls leaving in the car, and it did work fine. Yet to me, it felt too “Hollywood” to end with these girls escaping, because in reality, they probably could not have gotten very far. By following it up with their younger sister transcending in this way, it made their escape seem more magical. You start to wonder whether anyone is actually leaving, or if there is some sort of cosmic force that is enabling them to escape this situation.
I worked with my casting director Ruby Green, who has a company called Rudebelly Casting, in finding our lead, Chloe Carroll, who plays the middle sister. We first saw her on a casting website, and when she sent us her tape, we were like, “She really is this girl.” Heidi Schwartz, who we cast as the older sister, had mostly modeled before and hadn’t done much acting work. Chloe also was pretty young, and even though she was interested in acting, she hadn’t had that much experience. We actually found Seneca Fiedler, who plays the youngest daughter, because she was friends with the daughter of the person who owned the farm where we shot the film. So she grew up playing on the trampoline that she’s jumping on at the end.
They are all wonderful in the film, as is Sophia Depecol in your previous short, “Deer Girl.” That was galvanizing to watch when it screened at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, in part due to its stunning sound design.
I made that film during Covid, so it was a minimal shoot. I designed it so I would only be shooting with one actor at a time, in case things got worse. Since the images had to be so contained, I wanted the world of sound to fill in the gaps. I was lucky enough to work with Ron Eng, who had collaborated a lot with David Lynch. He took some ideas I had and propelled them in a way that I never could have done on my own. He also worked on “Hickey” with me as well. And Sophia is amazing. She is also a musician and just a really interesting person. I wanted to cast someone who had a certain kind of life in them, as well as a sense of darkness and curiosity that the character has. Because her character doesn’t speak at all in the film, there had to be something in the way she moved and her look that really fit the role.
What I found surprising and oddly moving about “Quaker” is its seeming evenhandedness, with the disillusionment experienced by Celina as its centerpiece. Each student gets to express their feelings without being silenced.
That is what a Quaker meeting is about. I grew up going to a Quaker school in Brooklyn. I went there my whole life even though I, along with most of the people who were enrolled there, are not Quakers. Yet if there is a religion that I would connect to the most, it would be Quakerism. A lot of our meetings were not like the one you see in the film. They were a bit quieter and not as many people would speak. But because the film takes place during the last meeting of the year, it provides a chance for everyone to say one last thing to each other. If they’ve never stood up, they may want to say the thing that they’re never said before.
The point of a Quaker meeting is that you’re supposed to say what you’re really feeling in the moment, and then everyone is supposed to leave silence afterward to reflect on what each person said. You can kind of respond, in a way, to what has been previously said when you stand up, but it’s supposed to be fueled more by inspiration than direct response. Of course, we kind of see that bending in the film itself. By being put into this kind of practice on a weekly basis, you get to know your community of peers in quite a different way. I think if you had asked me in high school if I was going to make a movie about a Quaker meeting, I would’ve told you no, but I also didn’t know at the time that I wanted to make films. I was interested in being a playwright or doing black and white photography, which is part of the reason why I made the film in black and white.
It took space in the years following high school for me to understand what a unique coming of age experience it was. I wouldn’t automatically volunteer with people that I went to a Quaker school because it felt strange to explain. But it got to a point, after I made “Hickey,” where it was coming up more frequently in conversations, and I realized that people were actually curious about my weird high school experience. I had never really seen it on film, so I started thinking about exploring it. I also thought it would be an interesting narrative challenge structurally to have a film limited to one space, where it has the feeling of a play but is still engaging to watch.
Whereas black and white is often used to symbolize conformity onscreen, the lack of color during the school meeting in “Quaker” suggests that this is a special, enclosed environment where everyone can be seen on equal terrain. The color we see as they exit the buildings felt indicative of the confusion one feels upon entering the real world.
When people hear the word Quaker, they tend to think of Quaker Oats. People would ask me, “Are they Mennonite?”, and I’d be like, “No,” but Quakers do traditionally wear a lot of grey that is indicative of their idea for a simple, minimalist life. Simplicity is a big part of Quakerism, and I wanted to play with that on a visual level. Because I went to such a modern and progressive high school, I wanted to put these modern teenagers into more austere tones of color. I really like the contrast in that. Also, when I was thinking about the film, I looked back on my high school yearbook, which is all in black and white.
Everything felt like a frozen memory, and I thought it would be cool to capture this moment in time through that lens. My DP Vittoria Campaner and I were really inspired by the films “Ida” and “Cold War.” We loved their DP Łukasz Żal’s approach to framing and use of black and white, especially in their portraits. “Quaker” is such a portrait-heavy movie, and my DP actually had the idea for us to go to color at the end. She wanted to give it more of a blue hour kind of feeling. I understood the mood she had in mind, but ultimately felt that it didn’t make sense since the kids are leaving school and it’s almost summer. I liked that there was almost this warmth at the end that feels strange in comparison to the black and white.
As much as Celina clearly states how eager she is to leave the community, she’s still looking around as if wondering whether anyone will sign her yearbook.
I first met Cecilia, the actress we cast as Celina, when she auditioned for “Deer Girl.” She gave me one of the strangest auditions that I’ve ever witnessed as a director and I wanted to cast her. But she was living in Miami at the time and because of Covid, it just wasn’t going to be possible to risk her flying on a plane to come to LA. So we kept casting and luckily found Sophia, but I continued to keep in touch with Cecilia. She was in a fantastic short called “Weapons and Their Names” that went to Sundance and featured another person, Greta Hicks, who we ended up casting as the popular girl with the buns in “Quaker.” When I had my Sundance fellowship, I attended the festival when Cecilia was there, but the only time we could actually meet was at the airport when we were leaving.
We had met in person just that one time, but I always knew that I wanted to write something for her. When I came up with “Quaker,” I thought this would be a perfect role for her. I adjusted some of the writing depending on who we cast. The role of Celina was mostly written, but Cecilia and I also talked a lot about her own high school experiences and tried to make sure that she would be channeling a kind of energy in the role that she could relate to as well. I just wanted to portray how we had this unique space where you can disagree and express how you feel and not be censored. It’s okay not to agree with everyone, but there are consequences to what you say as well.
I think Celina and Caroline have a shared feeling of being unable to connect with their classmates, but the manner in which they express it is completely different. When it comes off as kind of a dismissal and an attack from Celina, she’s met with confrontation about her own actions in the community, and how people have had their own frustrations when trying to connect with her. Caroline also expresses loneliness, but in a more mature way that connects with everyone. I was interested in how, at this age, one wants to be authentic with their peers and what it means to say goodbye at this time. There’s a lot of people that age who think they have everything figured out—but they don’t, obviously. [laughs]
There’s a fleeting moment that broke my heart where Caroline, after giving her speech, looks toward Celina, who refuses to return her gaze. In an alternate reality, I feel these two could’ve at the very least connected over their shared understanding.
Yeah, I think there is a tragedy to it. Even though there isn’t a clear idea of where these characters are going to go, you do have a sense that this is a period of their lives that may feel like an eternity, but is actually over at the end of the film. They are all going to go off and lead their lives and hopefully find people that they connect with better. Celina thinks her speech will get a bunch of her peers to join her in saying, “You’re all lying and inauthentic and I hate all of you too!” That doesn’t happen, but at least Celina chooses to express herself and hopefully learn something from it. During production, we were able to focus on each individual monologue and frame it in a way that complemented who that person was.
Because we don’t get so much time with each character, it felt like it was important to have the visual language speak to their identity and personality. Their reaction shots were just as important as their monologues in showing the degree to which they were or were not relating to their classmates. Since we were shooting in one location for three days, I had the opportunity to get more coverage than I ever have for a film, which was amazing. My editor Danielle Criqui and I had a lot to work with, but it was also a bit daunting because there are so many different versions of this film that we could’ve had. If we wanted an hour-long version of this film that actually reflected the length of a Quaker meeting, we probably could make one.
And I’d watch it! I also love how you preserve the mystery of the object embedded in the ceiling, the function of which remains unknown to the students.
I co-wrote the script with a friend of mine, Louisa Grenham, who grew up going to the same school. The story is all fictional, but as we were brainstorming about it, we were reminiscing about the types of things that people would say. What’s funny is that, because a Quaker meeting is meant to be a safe space, it was really hard to recall too many exact moments from them. It felt almost like you’d forget what people had said as soon as you left the room. You’d never talk about it after leaving either because it wouldn’t be very polite. But I do remember someone mentioning what was on the ceiling and how they didn’t know what it was. I had also stared at it for an hour every week for all of those years, so that’s where it came from. We’ll leave it as a mystery! [laughs]
What was the experience like of screening this film at Berlinale?
We had a really amazing time. Our world premiere took place in their Generation shorts section for viewers aged 14 and up. What I really love about their programming is that there’s an emphasis on having the people who are the age depicted onscreen be a huge part of the audience. Their other youth-focused short section is for kids young enough to be in kindergarten, and though it honestly has pretty mature films that are quite hard to understand, it’s really inspiring to see such thoughtful programming geared for children. Though the shorts programs are for all ages, including adults, a lot of young people and school groups are in attendance. “Quaker” played very differently in Berlin than it did in the U.S. We were curated with other sensitive coming of age films from a lot of different countries that I really loved and adored.
My film is meant to be funny, and there were some very polite laughs during the five screenings we had in Berlin. There was more laughter at some screenings than at others. But then, when “Quaker” screened at the enormous DGA Theater in LA as part of the Film Independent Artist Development Showcase, people were dying of laughter. At times they laughed at parts that weren’t supposed to be funny. I think people sometimes can’t take sincerity. When Celina stands up and essentially says, “Okay guys, this is all bullshit,” it’s because there is this phoniness coming through the sincerity that I think she can’t deal with. The tone is purposefully a bit stilted up until when she speaks. After that, it becomes more honest in the second half.
Tell me about your collaboration with producer Zoey Pressey, whose first producing credit—according to IMDb—is for the 2018 short version of “Shiva Baby.”
She was connected to me by another filmmaker friend who worked as a producer as well on “Quaker.” I had mostly been making films outside of New York, and Zoey is based there. “Quaker” was the first film that we worked on together. When Zoey was a sophomore at NYU, she was a producer on the “Shiva Baby” short, which I love so much. She works with Nuer Taqa at Radiance Pictures, where they’ve made incredible music videos and commercial work. They also were involved in the virtual unit for Kahlil Joseph’s great “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions,” which is like a fake documentary mixtape.
Radiance Pictures is now going into the feature narrative space and is working with me on “Kismet.” Zoey has been a fantastic support and collaborator from the beginning. We’ve obviously worked a lot closer together as we’ve been putting together the feature film just because it requires so much more work than a short. As a filmmaker, you do so much of your own work because you feel no one is going to care about your project more than you. In the rare situations where you can find someone else who also wants to champion your work with the same tenacity, it is quite special.
What has it been like going through the preproduction process on your first feature?
Writing a feature script has been the most substantial amount of the work because it is such a long piece and requires so much time. I started working on it in my Sundance Ignite Fellowship with my mentor Erin Vassilopoulos, who directed “Superior.” It really started in that kind of space, and then after it was over, I kept working on the script. Because so much of making a feature is getting your collaborators onboard and the funding for it, it’s such a different ballgame because it requires raising money.
My casting director for “Kismet” is Betsy Ware Fippinger, who worked on “Griffin in Summer,” “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” and “Eighth Grade.” She had so much experience in casting young talent, and because we were looking for the lead in a feature, it had to be someone whose family was prepared for what that entails. We also wanted to make sure that we were casting children who really wanted to act and weren’t being pushed into it at a young age. Betsy sent me the headshot of the girl we ended up casting as Stella, and she had an alien look to her. Then when she came in to audition, she turned out to be an incredible actor. She was able to be so emotional but also be a kid, and kind of toe the line so you weren’t sure whether or not she was actually an alien.
You also plan to use black and white for the underwater photography shot near Fire Island.
There aren’t too many films that have depicted Fire Island. Of course, there is Andrew Ahn’s amazing “Fire Island” movie based on Pride and Prejudice. A lot of people think of it as this popular summer destination, which it is, but it has an off-season community as well. I have friends who grew up on the island and attended the school there, where each grade has only about five kids. A lot more mysterious things happen, I would say, in the off-season. There is a scene in the film where two characters find a beached whale that’s on the shore, which is definitely something that happened to me when I was a kid. Strange things would come out of the ocean all of the time. There’s also a huge population of deer on the island. One time as a kid, I went into a clearing and found deer bones, an experience that is reflected in “Deer Girl.” There’s such a mystical element to the place that I’m excited to explore in my feature.
You have gotten me greatly enticed for it. In the meantime, I hope people seek out “Quaker.” Its release on Short of the Week couldn’t be better timed in our current era.
Laughter is an important medicine in dark times. Quakers are anti-war and all about equality. These are the types of principles I feel we all can benefit from.
“Quaker” is now available to stream here on the Short of the Week site. For more information on Giovanna, visit her official site.
