Director’s Statement

When I came out to my church over the summer, my mentor spent three months hosting a book club to help me fight the urge to stray from God. They were very intimate sessions with only one other woman.

My friends (because we did become friends over these strange three months) were very vulnerable with me. They shared their struggles to accept singlehood and heartbreak and broken marriages in the name of Christ. I sat with them and I prayed and I really thought that maybe with time I could love and obey God as they did. Or at least tried to do. And then I came back to Providence for the Fall semester and promptly started dating a girl. This film is inspired by that dissonant experience.

The film is structured into a three part arc both visually and aurally. A black and white suspense before the first moment of connection, a pink and blue euphoria, and then a quiet conclusion that merges the two states that come before it.

The first few shots in the film are all rendered in monotone, each shot cutting before the people depicted have a chance to face each other, to enter the room, to embrace. This postponed climax emphasises a feeling of suspense and frustration, but also creates a feeling of fear at what might be.

The film then transitions into a glowing pink and blue after the embrace, but in contrast to the clearly textured monotone scenes, the image is always blurred. Scenes of people coming together and coming apart are always hidden, perhaps censored because they were too blasphemous or too shameful, but also perhaps too tempting to be revealed with complete clarity.

People in this film are never fully revealed and never fully realised - always hidden behind the frame or beyond the viewer’s sight. The final shot and the conclusion of the film was inspired by a haunting image I couldn’t get out of my head of a group of people dancing in a ring. The people were very small and danced in slow motion in the middle of a barren landscape.

You could just barely make out where one person ended and another one began. In this version of the scene, it’s haunting in its distance from us. This inspired the conclusion - a vision of utopia, where not only is dancing allowed, but it is allowed to exist within God’s created landscape.

Another central image is of an anonymous person raising their arms and then turning their hands towards the back. The terror and guilt of knowing that an innocent person sacrificed themselves for your sins is an all consuming one. And yet, the further I stray from Christ, the more impersonal and unrelatable He becomes. And interestingly, I found that the images of surrendering, of giving and of embracing all begin with the raising of arms.

The red hands hold an uneasy tension between accusation and salvation. It is simultaneously violent as it blazes out at you and yet cathartic both in its associations with Christ and because it feels like release after so many images of denied climax. This film also relies heavily on the usage of frames - both as a device to accommodate the shifting aspect ratios of all the different canvas sizes as a result of working almost completely analogue, but also as a reaction to the fact that no frame is large enough to encompass everything that I embody - I cannot be both gay and Christian.

The frames in the film traps everyone within the space. It also serves to give the effect of “peering in”, like an outsider looking in, extending the out of place feeling to not just the characters but also the audience. The only shots in the entire film that are not framed are the central image of arms raising, and the utopic finale. These are the only images that i thought deserved to transcend the confines of the frame.

This is a very personal film. It stemmed from a personal story and a personal context and it’s why I chose to use analogue mediums too. It felt like too personal a story to surrender to the anonymity of a digital medium. I wanted the artist’s hand to be visible and I wanted the audience to be able to see it.

This film is about me, and yet, many of the images in the film seem to directly address the audience themselves. Women peer out of the frame and spread their legs and anonymous Christ-figures beckon with red hands. Even though this film began from a specific context I was reacting to, I wasn’t trying to capture that situation so much as the feeling of fear and shame and frustration that came with it.

So this film is for me, but it’s also really for you. I’ve had friends read it as being too scared to ask someone out, or of thinking that you’re not good enough for someone, or as being in a toxic relationship, and ultimately is about the very universal tension of craving intimacy, and trying to deal with all the obstacles that stand in the way of that.