Introducing: The Mirror
Introducing: The Mirror
A film by two girls across the world.
There are some things that come into your life, and without knowing it, you change vividly along with them. This film changed my life and there is no other way I could put it. Yet, what was interesting about this change, was that my life started to unfold like the story.
Yes, this film was based entirely on my life — But, the ending, I had to come up with. I had to dream up another future for myself and somehow depict it on screen. Before discovering it in my real life. I was envisioning in the dark. Attempting to paint the light of hope with a selection of shadowy colors. I’m realizing filmmaking is a strong form of creative manifestation. From May 2020 to October 2021 as we sculpted and carved this film, I also unknowingly did the same within my own life. The character who lives at the end of this film is the me that is living now. What of me that has survived and what has blistered open.
How a film walks with you and directs you back home.
I’ve been really scared to talk about and even share this film. The two weeks after we finished I found myself in a state of mourning. Here was this beautiful thing that I had been working on in secret with this creative twin flame of sorts and now our precious child had to leave our womb and into the harsh lights of perception. She had to be seen. And, I would have to be seen in a different way than I ever have before.
I’ve been hesitant to write here but now I’m finally ready, or at least I’m tired of waiting for myself to be. I vented to someone how it felt like releasing this film felt like giving birth and throwing the baby in the street, yet it’s still somehow connected to me through the umbilical cord. He said, if that’s your baby, you still have to care for it. It doesn’t end after the birth.
The magic of this story is not just the film but in how it happened.
In February of 2020, I was very lost. Lost almost feels too innocent of a word. I was stuck and sinking in the vision of the life I pined for. It wasn’t working. I was broke, living in my aunt’s house, and my 27th birthday was coming up. I was auditioning constantly for film and television projects but nothing substantial was happening. I was living the life of a struggling actress in the midst of a group of friends who were reaching career highs and peaks.
It felt like I was in a bottomless hole falling by myself while looking at a mirror, wondering where I had gone. Wondering who this reflection belonged to, who was rapidly growing dark and unrecognizable.
I wanted to run away from myself and the perceptions others had of me. It felt like I was trapped in this old, outdated version of self that was killing the person I was trying to become. It felt like I was my own worst enemy. That somehow I was sabotaging myself and making myself a bad actress who couldn’t get any roles. That because I had engineered myself as a people pleaser my entire life, that now when I could be free in the role of a character, I was still living in those old chains. I couldn’t be free as an artist because I wasn’t free as a person. Yet, that’s what everyone knew me as - my friends, my family, and strangers. I was the nice girl. But, the nice girl had violent thoughts and was thrashing to get out. This image inflicted upon me that I played out for so long had to be killed.
So, I wrote from that place. I cut these words and let her bleed on the page.
This was the original piece I wrote in February.
so i am throwing it all out. sticking my finger down my throat and forcing myself to purge. all of it, out. viciously. violently. with all the love i have deprived myself of for so long.
i battered myself with criticism. i was killing myself. what hope and what light had been swirling with formidable urgency my entire life - i was murdering it all. i was killing the very thing that kept me so abruptly alive. i excused it with being an artist. how this is what artists must go through to find their art. but i realized there was something far more serious happening beneath my surface.
it’s difficult. generating acceptance towards yourself. towards something that has the insidious power to deter the luminous trajectory of your deepest, most treasured dreams. to stop gulping in for air. to accept the impending exhale and along with it all the gunk and foul black that took up the fruitful places of your heart.
to deliver with sweetness what darkened vines have coiled around my fuchsia heart. beauty punctures me, how the red has dripped on my fingers. but as i lift my dripping hand i see how when i let something inside of me, i will only get more me out. where i let my skin be pierced - i am met with a sovereignty that lives inside of me. i yearned to become red, it’s ravenous power and beauty - yet i already was it.
Those lines. “Beauty punctures me, how the red has dripped on my fingers. but as i lift my dripping hand i see how when i let something inside of me, i will only get more me out.”
They were so vivid. So real. I read those words and felt like I could see them. Somehow, they felt like my way out. I had never experienced this with my writing before. These words felt like a map, a way to set me free.
Then a few weeks later, the unimaginable happened. The world shut down.
And something started happening to me. When the mirage of Los Angeles came to a grinding halt and all of the noise vanished. All of the conditions attached to being an actress outside of the art became very meaningless. All that survived was me and my mind. Left in my room in my aunt’s house in April 2020, something came back to me. Something I lost a very long time ago. That I squished down to make other things fit. To make myself more palatable. My ferocious and wild childhood imagination. It all came running back to me and whooshed around my life and made my room into magic. With nowhere to go, people to see, or any real work to do, I became a child again. Everything in my house became an experiment.
I took those sacred lines, put them into a poem, and titled it “The Mirror”. This was something I would have never done before because I was so used to letting my writing rot untouched on my computer. But, a friend passed along a poetry contest she insisted I submit to. So, I pushed myself and did it. It was extremely unenjoyable but I was proud of the outcome — though more so proud I actually completed something.
Time passed and my work wasn’t selected. I was bummed. But, on the upside I did have this finished poem, yet what was I to do with it?
It all started a bleak Monday in late April when I refreshed my inbox and found Girls In Film’s newsletter had arrived. They started a Girls At Home weekly feature highlighting young female filmmakers to keep up morale during the pandemic and it was my soul food. As I scrolled down to their Inspiration section, I saw this bullet point:
Elizabeth J Cassidy over in UK has also decided to carry on filming and not letting the pandemic to stop her and she made a short film called Lockdown, watch it on Youtube now.
Curious, I clicked the link. I had been toying with the idea of filming my own short film alone at home and it seemed like someone else was feeling similar inklings.
As I watched her film, I immediately knew.
I sat for a week going back and forth on if I should reach out to her. I just had a feeling that we should work on something together. What? I had no idea. How? Even less of an idea. But, I emerged from my indecision and messaged her. I told her how much her short affected me and if she was up for it, I would love to embark on the challenge of somehow creating something together. 5,437 miles away.
Eliza immediately accepted, and thus our journey began.
I shared with her my poem The Mirror to see if she at all resonated with it. To see if she saw anything of herself in it, too. She did. Thankfully. She also struggled with acting and the industry and diverted into directing because she felt more of herself there. More in her power. We shared anecdotes and horror stories of our times trying to “make it” and fell into a natural bond that immediately felt electric. We shared with each other our favorite films and music and began to weave and magnify our own creative earth. The playground and rich soil in which we would birth The Mirror.
Truthfully, I have never felt listened to creatively until Eliza. Perhaps, it was because I was also finally listening to myself. The stillness of the early pandemic brought out a strength to my inner voice that I had never experienced before. And, the way Eliza and I spoke was special. It felt like we were shooting beautiful fires at each other. Inspiration so magnetic and wild it kept me up at night. It brought so much electrified joy to those days engulfed by the plague of the state of the world.
So, we set to work and began production. Production being my iPhone armed with FilmicPro, our laptops, and three studio lights I borrowed repeatedly from my best friend. I connected my phone to my laptop and broadcasted my screen to her on Zoom. She directed everything as I set up the shots and acted across the world. My nights were her mornings and we often shot for hours on end. We treated none of this like it was meaningless. Every shot was made with utmost importance, precision, and intention. We were on an almost zero budget set but treated every part of the process like millions were involved.
We finished shooting on October 31st as it bled into November. From then on, we began post-production. We enlisted the help of the magically talented composer Veronika Waga in Sweden who created our sonic world. Then Yilmaz Ustunkaya was the master behind our glowing red titles. Come October 2021, exactly a year after shooting, we finished.
I wish I could tell you how important everything in this film is. I wish I could walk you through all of it so that you don’t miss a thing. But, I’m realizing that is the catch of being an artist. You have to let the work speak for itself. And in a world inundated with fast media and commercial garbage, I knew we couldn’t just let this live on instagram. So, we gave it a proper home on Vimeo. It’s harder to get to. But I know if you make it there, it means you at least tried. Knowing that is enough for me.
I hope you watch this film over and over. As someone who created it, I find new experiences during every watch. This film is all of me and what I want to do in this world. It’s my first footstep on the long journey of what will decide my creative path. It is what set me free and created a self-definition of myself that does not chain me but allows me to be infinite and take up boundless space. I am not just an actress. I was never supposed to just be just that. I am all of it. I am all of it.
So, here is all of me,
for the first time.
But, definitely not the last.
Sorry, but where is your movie?