The stream-of-consciousness experimental film, “Insomniac,” directed by and starring Anna Salinas, is about a sleepless night in the life of one young woman filled with hyperactive thoughts. We asked Salinas how the project came together, its biggest challenge, and a recent film she’s loved…

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

I've been writing and performing since I was a kid. I did some theater in college, but it wasn't till I got to LA that I started filmmaking. When I got here, I started taking classes at UCB, which got me into making video sketches, and from there I branched out into short films. 

2) How did this project start - what was the earliest element that came to you, and how did you go about building from that?

I wrote the project, unsurprisingly, during a bad bout of insomnia one night. I've had insomnia for years and felt so often that when I'd tried to explain it to friends or partners, they didn't understand quite what it was like. I guess I just wanted to channel the frustration into something visual. 

3) What was the biggest challenge in terms of finding the right tone for the film? And can you talk a bit about your decision to use stock footage and what you wanted to achieve with those images?

I love VO! I know it sometimes gets a bad rep, but I think it's so fantastic in movies like The Beginners and Twentieth Century Women. I wanted to capture the feeling of being truly alone in the middle of the night when you begin having conversations with yourself. The stock footage came from the feeling that the inside of our minds is so jumbled, especially in the cracked out state of anxiety and insomnia. I guess also in a way, it's meant to echo dreams. When we, information gets filtered through all these partial memories.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

The latest film I've watched is Susan Bier's After the Wedding. I love the intimate nature of the film, and how Bier doesn't mind just sitting in a scene, letting us watch the character fully process something. I just finished teaching a Nordic film class at UCLA, so I've been watching a lot of Swedish and Danish film lately. Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries was definitely somewhere in mind when I wrote Insomniac. 

5) What’s next for you?

I'm in development on a half hour adaptation of my webcomic ( @badcomixbyanna on Instagram) and also, unrelatedly, working on a cheese-centered podcast which should debut sometime next month.

Contact Info:

Website: http://badcomixbyanna.com

Twitter and IG: @badcomixbyanna