banner, and Juliette Larthe of Prettybird. Sarah Mosses’ Together Films is handling world sales on the title.
I feel like actors are almost like sociological documents and you can see so much of our time and generation in an actor’s body. If you watch films from the 1960s, you can see so much discontent, so much working-class anger and so much confusion in those bodies. How these performers carry the frame and navigate those things have a real visceral feeling of that era and time. Today, there’s so much anxiety with young people and I wanted to create what I hoped would be generational poetry.
We built Aden over a six-month period very forensically. But what is interesting – and we would both agree – is that we still don’t know him. His character is essentially an alien, so we don’t need to create a backstory because of this alien identity. I also wanted to creatively interpret that this is an Asian character but we’re going to withdraw his Asian backstory and treat him like an alien. There’s almost like a white gaze that comes with that.
: There’s a lot of radical politics throughout the film, whether it’s the politics of abolition, whether it’s colonialism or navigating quiet spaces. Every frame is loaded with it. But I didn’t want to write and direct a film that was didactic in anyway. Instead, I wanted to film an ambiguity that leaves the audience with questions and doesn’t provoke. These people are going on a journey, and it doesn’t have to feel smoothed out or neat.