Queens World Film Festival 2019 – Some of Her Parts
When future medicine allows people to live past the human body's shelf life, a young woman visits her grandmother in the hospital and is forced to question the value of immortality when you still end up in a box.
Interview with Director/Co-writer Abie Sidell, Co-writer Felix Handte and Producer Trevor Wallace
Watch Some of Her Parts here:
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
ABIE: Thanks so much! We're excited to talk to you. Some of Her Parts was originally born from my experience struggling with chronic illness. You know, when you're diagnosed with something without a cure, you find yourself being asked how much you're willing to give up for your health. The way our current system functions, that sacrifice usually takes the form of outrageous medical bills. So sure, our medical science is sophisticated enough that you can have a serious illness and live without enormous pain and discomfort, but only at the cost of thousands of dollars every few weeks, and that's with good insurance! It's just an incredible sacrifice that we're asking people to make all the time, and it's deeply dehumanizing. In such a system, we're not treating people, we're treating diseases.
FELIX: I’ve been working with Abie as his creative partner and cinematographer for years, and I was excited when we started talking about these issues, and what a movie about them might look like. The both of us being lifelong fans of speculative fiction, we found ourselves exploring how to take these issues to their logical extremes, where dehumanization in medicine becomes all but literal. If healthcare in our current society is fixed on the preservation of life at the expense of the person, then what if in the future you could literally sacrifice parts of yourself to live longer? How much of yourself could you give up and yet remain you?
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
ABIE: Because Some of Her Parts hopefully encourages the audience to empathize more with people who are differently abled, and people we all know and love whose humanity is endangered by our society’s avarice. My hope is that the movie can challenge the audience’s assumptions about what it means to be human, because in the strangeness of this digital postmodern age, those assumptions should be thrown into question.
Less loftily, because I’m fortunate enough to collaborate with so many brilliant artists who’ve all worked hard to bring Some of Her Parts to life. I can be critical of my own work, but everyone else’s work on this film is just amazing. For example, Felix’s work as our cinematographer, the incredibly thoughtful work of our Production Designer Molly Grund, and the score by our composer, John Thayer, all make for an enormously rich and satisfying viewing experience for the audience.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
ABIE: Obviously Some of Her Parts is deeply personal for me, but in the process of making it, it became clear that the risk of dehumanization in healthcare is a pressing theme in all our lives.
FELIX: In the film, Vanessa, played by the extraordinary Jessica Lara Bentley, goes to the hospital to visit her ailing grandmother Miriam; who has been fighting a rearguard action with life for so long that she’s now only a featureless box with a camera on top of it. And while Miriam’s condition sounds absurd on the surface, the experience of visiting a loved one whom you’re not quite sure is actually there in the room with you is sadly, profoundly universal.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
FELIX: You know, when Abie and I wrote the script, we thought it was a comedy. We thought we’d written this piercing dark satire of our healthcare system and the two of us were sitting there at my computer laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. Cut to three months later, we’re sitting there at our first rehearsal and the room is silent because we’re watching Rolando Chusan, who plays Nurse Miranda, deliver a piece of bad news about Miriam, and it’s just devastating.
ABIE: It’s one thing when you’re sitting there abstracting healthcare to this silly extreme, laughing about how wild it would be for an old woman to be a box. But when you’re lucky enough to have actors talented enough to inhabit that world and bring it to life, and I’m directing them to treat this box on a bed as if it’s a human being, a true scene partner; well then it’s incumbent upon me to do the same. We’re asking the audience and ourselves as filmmakers to empathize with her, and when you actually empathize with Miriam, doomed to her box on this hospital bed for an interminably long life looking out at the same dull green wall, then suddenly it’s not so funny.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
ABIE: We’ve seen so many different, interesting responses to the movie. One thing that pops up a lot is people seem to compare the movie to Black Mirror, and while I of course appreciate the comparison to a wildly popular show, I think there’s a key distinction to be made. If Black Mirror often takes a somewhat technophobic position on the dangers posed by our relationship with tech, where technology brings out the worst in people, then I think Some of Her Parts is more a movie about a society lacking in empathy that has brought out the worst in technology.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
ABIE: I was really worried that healthcare providers would take issue with the movie’s depiction of medicine and the relationship between providers and patients as this cold, inhuman thing. And certainly some people have expressed those concerns. But to my surprise, most people appreciate that the movie is a cautionary tale, and I’ve had so many wonderful conversations with providers who are eager to talk about their own push towards patient-centered care.
TREVOR: The most surprising thing to me has been how most audiences seem to enjoy finding a “solution” to the puzzle the film presents. “Is she really alive in the box?” is a question most of my conversations about the film have focused on, and I am surprised but also delighted the premise has generated such a variety of approaches to answering that question.
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
TREVOR: Even as the internet makes distribution of indie and short films more accessible, it can still be a daunting challenge to get your film in front of people. Every opportunity to talk about our work is a privilege. Being featured on a site with a strong reputation for promoting diverse creative voices, where the viewer can also get a peek into the filmmaking process, is a tremendous way to hopefully bring our film to a wider audience.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
ABIE: As Trevor said, it’s a real pleasure to talk about the film with a critically engaged audience, and we’re eager to keep doing that. Whether that means getting that message out through more press like this, or continuing to bring the film to more festivals, we’re open to any and all avenues to continue this conversation.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
TREVOR: The common thread between all our favorite responses is that the film got folks thinking about an aspect of their lives: a relationship, a memory. When that happens we’ve succeeded in making good speculative sci-fi.
ABIE: Good sci-fi always comes back to the present moment. I want the audience to challenge how they define health for themselves and for others. And if the film can promote any greater empathy for the people in our society struggling under the weight of our broken healthcare system, then it will have been a success.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
ABIE: As I said earlier, in Some of Her Parts, people in the future can make the choice to trade their bodies for longer life. My hope is that this film challenges people to consider that people wouldn’t need to, if we in the present can promote healthcare which treats the whole sum of a person, and not only their parts.
Would you like to add anything else?
FELIX: Only to thank you for taking the time to talk to us about the film, and to invite anyone and everyone to check the movie out and to join us in this conversation. It’s much larger than just this one story, and these are themes we’ll continue to explore in all our work.
ABIE: What he said, except with more prosaic language that he’ll cut later.
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
ABIE: My friend (and amazing writer) Chris Mello just delivered a draft of a script for the next film we’re planning to make, which is also a semi-absurdist take on the near-future. This one is set in a society much like ours, where corporations hire real people to manage their brands. But in this movie, these people occupy corporate personas in the real world and not just on social media. And in the timeless cinema tradition, the story is about two corporations with no business being together but who fall in love. The rest of our team at Rad Rhino probably won’t let me keep it, but the working title is RomeOrg & JulieInc.
FELIX: We’re not keeping the title.
Interview: March 2019
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
Some of Her Parts
When future medicine allows people to live past the human body's shelf life, a young woman visits her grandmother in the hospital and is forced to question the value of immortality when you still end up in a box.
Length: 10:23
Director: Abie Sidell
Producer: Trevor Wallace
Writer: Abie Sidell, Felix Handte
About the writer, director and producer:
ABIE SIDELL is the co-writer and director of Some of Her Parts. He works as a filmmaker in New York making educational films for Columbia University and marketing content for Marvel Entertainment. He moonlights as a personal chef to his roommates.
FELIX HANDTE is the co-writer and cinematographer of Some of Her Parts. Felix works during the day as a software engineer at Facebook, and during the night as a software engineer at Facebook. Somehow he also finds the time to make movies.
TREVOR WALLACE is the assistant director and co-editor of Some of Her Parts. Trevor is a freelance editor from the Small Potato (Boise, Idaho) now living and working in the Big Apple.
Key cast: Jessica Lara Bentley (Vanessa), Rolando Chusan (Nurse Tech Miranda)
Looking for: journalists, distributors, film festival directors
Facebook: Abie Sidell
Twitter: @absidell
Instagram: @absidell
Website: radrhi.no
Made in association with: Radical Rhinoceros Pictures
Funders: Self-funded & Kickstarter
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month? The Queens World Film Festival/The Museum of the Moving Image – Sunday, March 31st; More festivals and an online release to come....