5 Questions with Kathy Esquenazi Mitrani
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I was born around cameras. I spent the first seven years of my life in Bogota, Colombia where my mom worked as a fashion photographer. I either watched or was part of her photo shoots. In the early 2000s, security issues forced my mom, my siblings and I to move permanently to the US. The life that I knew abruptly turned from artful to practical. The years passed and when it came time for college, my parents talked me into pursuing a finance degree with the goal of helping my father bring his business over to the US. It wasn’t until I came back from a semester abroad in Thailand that I began to question my life and what my next steps should be.
I knew the path I was on wasn’t mine and I was looking for classes that would make my last year of school meaningful for me. I took a film theory class and a production class where I shot my first documentary short about women and their relationship with their hair. I loved the spontaneity of filming, the long hours of editing and creating something tangible from an idea; the process was thrilling. At the end of the semester, our professor organized a screening for us at the local film festival where, for the first time, I saw experimental films on a big screen and heard the filmmakers talk about their work. This was very exciting for me. I felt inspired by the work, the reaction to the work and the intention behind the work. I wanted to do this. After graduation I moved to LA where I spent the next two years learning about the industry, watching hundreds of films and filming my first narrative short. I committed to my new path, I applied to the Columbia University Film MFA program where I am now, working on narrative shorts, feature screenplays and developing a television series.
2) What was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
When I first wrote this script it was about a girl who used her sister’s stuffed animal to masturbate and was then shamed for it. I was interested in how/when girls first discover their sexuality. Through conversations with women close to me I learned that most of us, unlike my male friends, were discouraged from exploring our bodies when we were young. But I never got that version of the script to work. Mainly because it was difficult for me to authentically track “the first time.” By then my questions about sexuality spread into how we, as girls, start to define our femininity.
To help me organize my ideas, one professor asked me to name images I had in my head. The first two things I saw were my mom propping my 10 year-old self on a bathroom counter to wax my mustache and me, again at 10, standing naked in front of my mom’s camera. Once I started thinking about what those moments meant to me I started to understand what Rozada was supposed to be about. I now wanted to develop a project that looked into how we as girls look to our mothers for guidance in the process of discovering our femininity/sexuality and meanwhile how the world around us has expectations for how we should be. But I also wanted to celebrate the intimate moments that a young girl shares with her mother and observe how different versions of femininity are passed on through generations.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
The biggest challenge in making Rozada was choosing to film in Bogota and more specifically in the apartment I grew up in. On one hand, I had never shot a film in Colombia before so naturally there were challenges in adjusting to a different working environment and building trust with new people. Some of the work ethic that exists there was completely new to me and challenging in ways I wouldn't have imagined. On the other hand, the last time I remember seeing that apartment was when I left it for good 20 years ago. Reliving a time in my life while making a movie about it was an intense experience. Rozada was the most personal material I had ever worked with. So I was definitely pushing through emotional baggage and facing personal challenges.
I feel every part of the process has it’s magic but there is something particularly amazing about the time between pre-production and production. It is the time when people start getting involved and we start realizing the world through a series of decisions, like casting the characters, designing the world, choosing how to frame it, that the project starts to develop its own heartbeat. Then we bring these decisions to set and we see the heartbeat pump life into what was once an idea. This is the most rewarding part of the process for me. I thrive when I am with a team of people working together to make something meaningful.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I saw Tampopo by Juzo Itami two weeks ago and have been on a Juzo Itami quarantine binge since. His work is brilliant. His films are incredibly specific, deep and often loosely free from the main plot. I find his willingness to play around with the audio/visual medium incredible, especially in Tampopo. He is able to evoke feelings in the viewer, transmit information and create a deep level of understanding and empathy for a specific world (in this case food culture in Japan) with a unique treatment of sounds and images. There’s a great scene where a woman is teaching a group of other women how to eat spaghetti. After she explains how to eat it, the rest of the scene plays in silence except for the loud slurping sounds coming from all the women eating spaghetti like they would eat noodles. I thought the use of sound and image was so simple and powerful. All his films go into a deep level of detail in unique ways that is quite remarkable. They remind me of why I love movies so much.
5) What’s next for you?
I am currently in post production for another short narrative I shot last summer about a teenage girl that follows peer pressure and finds herself in a difficult situation she could never have imagined. I am also developing another short narrative and working on my feature screenplay with hope that there’s light at the end of this COVID purgatory.
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IG: @K____e____m (four underscores)
Facebook: @Kathy Esquenazi-Mitrani