By Leo Collis.
“This isn’t a coming out story. This is just a story about a group of people and who they happen to love. I find that, as an artist, it was important to have Cal just be.”
—Ali Edwards
Navigating the world is tough at the best of times. Doing so as a recent graduate with seemingly endless possibilities but a gauntlet of obstacles is even more so. As an artist, especially, how do you balance your creative endeavours with financial stability without compromising your integrity? And how do you do all that while still trying to discover who you are as a person?
August at twenty-two is a coming-of-age drama considering love, friendship, ambition and just straight up trying to function in New York as a young creative.
“It’s about the messiness of finding yourself and your art in your early twenties,” says screenwriter and star Ali Edwards, who plays Cal Davidson. “It specifically follows a floundering actress who accidentally falls in love with her best friend’s girlfriend. She’s kind of a fantasy version of the worst that I have in me. But I say that with a lot of grace because she’s just trying to figure things out…. She is a romantic, she is hopeful, she is messy and confused, and she’s just kind of grasping at whatever is in front of her to assemble a life that she is hoping to achieve.”
It’s director and screenwriter Sophia Castuera’s first full-length feature film. On the subject of challenges, that should surely rank pretty highly. “That was a feat,” Castuera says. “Our first day of shooting, we lost our main location. Cal’s bedroom, where pretty much a third of the movie was supposed to be shot in, was no longer available. But it was a really good lesson. If anything that terrible were to happen, it should be on the first day, because then you have the rest of the production to make up for lost time. Thankfully we had a great producer, a great assistant director and cinematographer. So after we had to clear everything out of the apartment we were in, we sat with Ali on a stoop outside of a random Greenpoint apartment and mind-melded and figured it out.
“Something I took away from that was that your team is so important, especially for a feature. A lot of people mistakenly think the director is the biggest and only component that makes or breaks a movie, and I really don’t believe in that in art in general. I think art is a collaborative medium, and that’s what makes it so beautiful, especially in film. And if I didn’t have Ali, Mary Elizabeth Monda (producer), Sakshi Gurnani (assistant director), Melina Valdez (cinematographer), then I wouldn’t have known where to go from there.”
If Cal Davidson was approached with that kind of problem, I’d wager she’d just keep smiling as if nothing had ever happened, despite feeling crushed inside. “Honestly, playing Cal was very difficult,” Edwards says, “because she holds so much anxiety, and she wants so much, but she is generally optimistic despite her self-doubt and often self-loathing. She walks into every room with the attitude of, ‘I want everything in here. I’m gonna get everything in here.’ But also, she’s thinking, ‘Everyone hates me.’ It was tough to carry that personally.”
It’s understandable that she harbours some of those feelings. After graduating, it feels like life is going to get easier—or at least that’s what you’re often told by parents, professors or friends. But especially in a capitalist society where money trumps nearly everything, you’ve either got to work really hard to get even close to what you want or be extremely lucky. That hasn’t quite clicked with Cal yet.
“Cal compares herself to everyone around her,” says Edwards. “It is a question in art especially how you measure success. For example, Bobby (played by Jorge Felipe Guevara) is perhaps one of the most successful characters in the movie. He’s pretty much got his shit together. He’s working hard consistently on his art, he is achieving his goals. But Cal doesn’t realise that because of the way she measures success and the way she’s been told to measure success.
“Myself and the creative team, as young artists, have to constantly grapple with ourselves. What does success mean as an artist? What does success mean if you’re not making money? I think success as an artist is when you’re making art. Whatever that means. And that’s why I think Cal kind of loses it, because she stops making art. But when she refocuses, that is a sign that she’s heading toward success.”
“As a Californian” Castuera adds, “I was fed this narrative about New York being a place for artists. It totally is, and there is such a community of indie film-makers and indie theatre-makers. But then you also have Broadway, and you also have huge studios coming to New York and filming and taking up blocks in Brooklyn, and you see these big celebrities. That’s where all the money is going to. Not to say that there aren’t amazing grant programmes, and the NYC Council on the Arts is incredible, but it’s incredibly competitive, and especially in a city like this when you’re just trying to be an artist and live truthfully to that, monetary value is always a thing that comes up. I’m not always sure how to commercialize something or monetize something, I just want to make art and be happy about that.”
Edwards and Castuera are making their art as part of Lady Parts Productions, alongside “third work wife” Mary Elizabeth Monda. The goal is to tell queer, feminist stories, primarily working with all-female sets. “It’s about assembling communities that are underrepresented and using our resources and abilities to uplift untold or unheard voices and stories,” Edwards notes.
Castuera continues, “I think it’s very important for us to have at least the main leadership roles in any project to be led by women or non-binary folks.”
While August at twenty-two is a queer drama, that doesn’t mean that the characters expressly define their own sexuality. The sexuality of the characters is never fully explained or explored, because, simply, there is no reason to. “Ali writing this from such a personal place, as a queer woman, means that the queerness of the story just was,” Castuera says. “There was no need to explain it. Ali’s life is surrounded by queer people who just exist. That is part of the normalisation process. We’re trying to normalize queerness in film. A way to do that is to have these stories about coming out, but there’s also another part of it that is just having the queerness implicit in the stories. In my experience, and I believe in Ali’s, a lot of people, especially in New York City and Brooklyn, come as they are because it is a safe place to do so, and there’s no need to overexplain it.”
“I think having Cal’s sexuality, and everyone’s sexuality in the film, not explicitly explained was really important to us,” Edwards adds. “This isn’t a coming out story. This is just a story about a group of people and who they happen to love. I find that, as an artist, it was important to have Cal just be. I find myself doing a lot of explaining about my sexuality as a queer woman. I think it’s important to show that it is just as it is. Cal loves who she loves, and that’s it.”
“In the past with straight protagonists, there was never a need to say, ‘By the way, I’m straight,'” Castuera observes. “They just are assumed to be a heterosexual person. And I think that is something we are trying to achieve with this movie. Giving queer characters the same treatment. That’s not to say that coming out stories and the explanation of queerness in other films is not important, because it really is. There are so many people in today’s age who have such a dangerous time when they come out. They need that space to say what they are and to feel safe and embraced. So this is two sides to the same coin. Those stories are super important, but this is also important, the implicit leaving it alone and not explaining it.”
August at twenty-two is available on iTunes, Apple TV, Roku, Voodoo, Google Play, Amazon Prime and more video-on-demand platforms.
Sophia Castuera will be shooting short film Good Choices in August.
Ali Edwards is working on feature film Projection Room, starring Sophia Castuera.
Leo Collis is a Film, Media and Journalism graduate from The University of Stirling.