Sarah Bliss
Written by: Daisy Herrera
Sarah Bliss is a multifaceted individual and artist who is particularly known for her skillful use of hand-processed techniques. Having engaged in numerous solo exhibitions, residencies and screenings, spanning from museums to backyard venues, Sarah is currently working on a film which explores sexuality and desires within aging bodies. Much of her work can be seen on her website Sarahblissart.com.
May 14, 2024
Daisy
Well, thank you for doing this, I’m very excited. I will start with my very first difficult question, which is what does feminist filmmaking mean to you?
Sarah
Before we jump into that, just tell me a little bit about you as a filmmaker and a little bit about the class that you're doing this for.
Daisy
Yeah. So this feminist filmmaking class—through this course, I really feel like my mind has expanded about what feminist filmmaking means. And to be quite honest, I'm still trying to figure out where I fit into that mold and what that means to me. Here at UCSC, we really don't see any work from women. I am very, very grateful to have been accepted into this course, with Irene, because it has been amazing—the films that she has been showing have been amazing. Experimental filmmaking is just not something that has ever been put there in front of us. And as someone who has just started to really take filmmaking seriously—I mean really trying to figure out who I am as a filmmaker and what kind of stories I want to put forward, I think it's very important to open my eyes and open my tool palette to different methods that I can use.
Sarah
Yeah. thanks for that background and really wonderful to hear that, how much this course has really been opening your mind and your eyes and your heart. Maybe, thinking about what kind of filmmaking you really want to be doing. For me, I think of a few things when I think about what it might mean to be a feminist filmmaker. I think, primary, for me, is working with the body. And when I say that, I mean both my subject matter, and also the way that I work. So my choice to use film, for instance, as opposed to video, is really linked to my love of being really connected to my body and to the process of making. I found that when I discovered analog film, which was in 2017… In 2016, I went to Film Farm in Canada. Are you familiar with the Film Farm? Have you heard of it before?
Daisy
Yeah, I have.
Sarah
Oh, wonderful. What's been your introduction to Film Farm? What do you know about it?
Daisy
I mean, when I was kind of digging deep into your work, I saw a lot of, different experiences that you've been through.
I want to be more open to different programs. I can only speak about UCSC, because that's where I am; we don't really have discussions of what to do after we graduate. And I am a senior. And, I'm not going to lie, I've had a lot of moments where I'm like, what do I do? What kind of programs can I get into? What kinds of connections can I make? And I think I'm just at that level where I really want to grasp what it means to be a part of a production, to be a part of a crew, a team that knows what they're doing.
Sarah
Well, just on that topic, one thing that's been really important for me is being part of a film collective that I am a member of which is called the AgX— for silver nitrate—film collective, which is based in Boston. I live a couple hours west of Boston in the more rural part of the state. There's some really great filmmaking going on here. The region that I live in is often referred to as the Five Colleges—like Hampshire and Mount Holyoke and UMass and Amherst College. So there's really a lot of intellectual and creative life going on. I'm really fortunate that way, but it's also really great being connected back into the Boston area where there's a lot happening. And, it’s the home of a lot of experimental filmmaking. I really would encourage you, whatever kind of filmmaking that you want to do going forward, to find your buds. Really. Yeah, that's so important. I think that's part of feminist filmmaking. It is about community, and it's about the collective, and it's about the idea that no one of us makes a film alone and there's none of this hero model. And, for me, being a very process based filmmaker, so much of the joy and the satisfaction in making films is in the making of it. The relationships that I build are really important to that. I had a mentor once who said to me, “When you're thinking about setting out for a new project, think less about what you want to make and more about who you want to be spending time with.” And that's really just beautiful. That really has rung true for me. And so I've built projects around that—like choosing first, who do I want to get to know better? Who do I really feel alive with? Who am I fascinated with and who do I want to spend time with? And, you know, play with?
Film Farm is really a film farm. It was founded on a feminist pedagogy. It was founded by a husband-wife team, Phil Hoffman and his wife.I think this year is the 30th anniversary of Film Farm. And it's an incredible experience. It's about an hour and a half northwest of Toronto and in the country, and there's ten filmmakers from around the world that come together, many of whom have never picked up an analog camera before. They're artists, but they may not have ever worked in moving image before. And, in the course of a week, you learn how to shoot, develop and edit film and make a film, and you live together. You eat together, you sleep together. You don't sleep very much. My experience of being there was it was an agape experience, which is a Christian word that means love feast. And that's what it felt like. It felt like, and this is very much about the feminist pedagogy, really coming into relationship with oneself, with other people and with the land, the place where one is. So all three of those types of relationality being really centered and important. And time is made for deepening into those, to that experience of relationship and exploration…and the emphasis on the body.
I started out as an artist. I started as a painter. One of your questions was about how I came to make films.
FROM THE FARM
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, April 2017
Run time: 73 minutes. 13 films screened on 16mm and as HD transfers
Your New Pig is Down the Road. 4:49. 16mm, sound. 2000. Canada.
Daisy
Yeah. How did you know you wanted to be a filmmaker? What inspired you to pick up a camera?
Sarah
Yeah, well, for some time, my paintings had become more and more three dimensional, and had been coming off the wall more and incorporating other objects. I got really drawn into a series of work that was really about light and time. The paintings were made out of bubble wrap and black plastic wrap. While I was working, I would hang these paintings on the wall of my studio, and I had these big, huge windows in the studio. And I would just sit in front of the paintings, sometimes for hours. I'm also a Buddhist practitioner, so I have that. A lot of people maybe wouldn't do that. But, I would just love to be so absorbed and watching time move across the paintings through the experience of light moving across the paintings. And because they were three dimensional, [I was] watching how the paintings changed as the light moved across them. I began making a series of photographs of the paintings over the course of the day. And so I was more and more being pulled into my interest in the passage of time and three dimensionality.
I was awarded my first month-long residency at a place called the Vermont Studio Center in Northern Vermont. And in that residency, I didn't know what I was going to make. What happened was I was out for a walk one day, and I found these four metal poles somebody had thrown into a junk pile. And something about them called out to me. I brought them back to the studio, and I put two poles parallel to each other and leaning against one wall, and the other two poles opposite them, doing the same thing on the other wall. I don't remember what caused me to do this, but I started walking back and forth across the studio between the poles, and each time I would come to the set of poles, I would, with my pencil, make a hatch mark on the wall in between the poles. And this ended up being a month-long project. I would for hours every day walk back and forth between the poles and make my mark. And it was really an investigation around labor. Because right outside my studio window, there was a huge construction project going on, building a new bridge over a river. And I was thinking about the construction workers and their really heavy physical labor, and then thinking about me doing this intellectual or creative labor in the studio. And what's the relative value of the labor, and what does it matter? All these questions. I really just dove into exploring the creative labor of this, as stripped down as I could.
They have the branding, they have wounds that the cow had. And when you project into them, you can have the hides hanging in different ways from the ceiling or the walls, and the audience can move around them. You can view the moving image from both sides of the hide, and when you view it from the backside, you can see all those marks of the body. So the marks of the life of the animal become layered onto the bodies of the film subjects in really interesting ways. And in that project, we were working with the idea of creating an updated version of the Icarus Daedalus myth. And we worked with a team of about ten theater artists and dancers, and my husband, who was not a theater artist or a dancer, but was an amazing physical presence—and a real range of ages. So there was my husband, who was in his 80s at that point. And then there was a wonderful dancer named Andrea Olson—she's that age, and we were working with her also. That work was installed in a gallery for about five weeks, and it was really powerful. I spent a lot of time in the gallery when it was up, and arranging post-viewing group discussions for people. I really had a chance to get a sense of people's experience of it. And it was really powerful how difficult and shocking it was for many people to see, because the bodies were naked or close to naked, and people were really jarred and affected and moved and scared. Yeah, all the emotions, all of that. These are older bodies that were intimately engaged with each other, and that were, you know, the sagging flesh and all of it… That felt really important to be able to make work like that, and to be able to normalize the experience of the human body in all of its life stages, and to say, the body is beautiful and powerful and our sexuality matters and our erotic life matters. I use that word “eros” in erotic—the erotic as much larger than just the sexual, in the sense of sensual experience and sensual relationship to the world around us. In my mind, to be a true artist is to really be attuned at that level. In many of the pieces that you referred to in the emails that we had back and forth, you see what's important to me. I'll just say that's a little bit about what makes me a feminist filmmaker.
Daisy
I think right now, for me, being an early filmmaker, these conversations are so important to me, because, as a young woman, I'm still finding how to be comfortable in my own body. And when I was looking at your work, I was like, “wow.” In the films and media of today, we don't see those bodies. There's a conventional beauty that is put forward, and we're told: this is what's beautiful. This is what people want to see. And when you see something outside of that, it's like—oh, our bodies are beautiful. Like, what are you talking about? Growing up, there was always that insecurity. And now, with my work, I want to go outside of that, because I feel like right now I have a very fixed mindset of what beauty is and what a body should be. I think that can also be really limiting to how I view things and how I make films. And that's why I fell in love with your work. Seeing it, I was like, “Wow, this is so refreshing to me. It's amazing, because you don't see this.” In our courses, a lot of the things that we watch are male gaze and are made by men. And a lot of the time, you just have to take ten steps back and be like, “no, there's more things, there's more narratives that can be put forward.”
I will jump into my next question about the new film that you're working with, Aging Bodies. Exploring sexuality and desire within aging bodies is so refreshing —to just hear their voices. One question that I want to ask, being a director working with other people, is how do you make people feel comfortable enough to open their vulnerability and open their own stories to you? Going forward, that's always my main priority—having people feel comfortable and, of course, always asking for their permission. I just want them to feel safe. And so that's a question that I had while watching this —what was that process like?
Sarah
In terms of working as a director with the subjects that I'm filming, it's interesting. My work has really evolved over the years. For many years, I filmed myself, and also, a number of my films were about the land and I wasn't filming other people. But there came a point where I felt the limit of that, and I was ready for something more. I was also really aware that, in my personal life, my non-filmmaking life, my relationship in groups was something that was challenging for me—what it meant to be part of a community was something that didn't come easily to me. But it was something that was very important to me and that I really valued. And I made the really conscious decision that I wanted to move toward that in my life. I see my filmmaking and my non-filmmaking life as not very separate. And so, my filmmaking became another place for me to cultivate those relationships.
Now when I look at my work over the last five years, I’m more and more working with other people. I've had your question from other people before, being really just sort of struck by how at ease the subjects feel in the film. I think a huge part of it is what I bring into the filmmaking arena—what I bring energetically, and through my body. I'm really conscious of my body as a resource in that way. And I take time before my shoots to really get centered and to think through what three adjectives would I use to describe the experience that I'd like people to leave this shoot with? What do I want to help? What are the most important qualities that I want to help co-create? And I bring those into my consciousness. I see myself as a channel for that kind of co-creation. And then, when I enter the shoot, I'm really grounded. That's really important. If I'm not grounded, if I'm really anxious, it's awkward.
I'm still learning how to work with Bolex and how to work with film. It's really different from working with video. And so especially initially, there was a lot of anxiety about just the technical. And so I would be really absorbed in that. And that takes you away from being able to be present. So the more that I learned the technical skills of how to work with a camera, the more practice I had, and the more that could become second nature, the more that allowed me more space to really be able to cultivate the energetic presence. I just can't emphasize how important that's been. And part of that presence, too, is about a mindset of play and process. I don't work with storyboards. I don't have an idea of what I want to have happen. I don't script things. It's not about that for me. I'm really interested in what's going to unfold.
Daisy
I love how you're using the word play, because I am the same way. I enjoy working in a group setting, and especially with my friends. I want them to leave this being like, “I had a great time and we did something amazing.” And a lot of the time I do go into a lot of my projects not having anything written. And then I'm like, “You know what? Let's just have fun. Let's bounce off of each other's energy and we'll see where that leads us.” So I really do appreciate that, because I think a lot of the times we forget that, and we try to be very strict, like we have to stick to a certain schedule. But sometimes I just want to hang out with my friends, you know? I think we're still very much in the early stages of learning who we are as people and as filmmakers. Because that's why we got into this—to play with narratives, play with stories, and just have fun. So I really appreciate you saying play, because a lot of the times I feel like professors are very stern—like, this is how Hollywood does it.
Sarah
I didn't go to film school. I'm totally self-taught, so I don't have any of that baggage. And it's really interesting to me. You're saying that films made by women aren't shown.
Daisy
Yeah. And then again, to bring it back to the male gaze, we keep watching the same films, and I'm like, “come on.” Let's get out of Hollywood. Let's try to do more independent films that we can show in class or even to other students. Because, I think when it comes to big box office movies, it's usually the same narratives, the same stories. And for me personally, I find people's personal stories a lot more interesting. I think a lot of marginalized people have very different viewpoints and they have a different lens. And that, for me, is something that I always see as a person of color. I'm Mexican American. I always try to look for people who look like me, my body type. I am like a peach pear. I'm way more curvy, as I would say. I'm always looking out for representation. And even through my films, I'm always trying to make people feel included. But it is very hard, because the films that we are being shown and told are good films are not always showcasing that.
Sarah
More power to you. I'm so thrilled to hear what's important to you and how you're pursuing and prioritizing that. It's really like: you go, girl! That's fantastic.
Back to thinking about the gaze in the current project that I'm working on, Uncovered. I thought a lot about the gaze. I've been working on it for two years now, and for a long time, my plan was that I would not appear in the film at all. I was really just interested in exploring the female gaze on the male body and, you know, just turning that around…and particularly the aging male body, which you never see. I mean, first of all, you almost never see male bodies nude, and then if you do, certainly not older aging bodies. It felt really important to me and really empowering.
UNCOVERED
Work-in-process. 16mm and HD video.
I felt like the film actually didn't start out being about my story. It started out being about two friends of mine, two older men, Jim and Al, who you hear from in the film. I didn't know Jim at all. My friend Al took me to a theater performance that Jim was doing in his home. In the piece, Jim ended up stripping down totally naked and then getting dressed again in women's clothes, and talking about his relationship to his gender expression and how that had changed since his wife had died a few months prior. And everybody in the room was blown away, because they all knew Jim really dearly, and nobody knew this part of Jim. On the way home from the theater production, Al and I were riding together, and I was asking Al about his friendship with Jim, and learned that they would often spend time in Jim's garden reading out loud to each other. I instantly had this vision of filming the two of them both nude, sitting in chairs and reading out loud to each other. Al is a Vietnam vet. He has a really different relationship to his body from Jim, and there's a lot of shame connected to his body. And that act of reading together, reading out loud to each other is such an intimate act. I was really moved by the thought of these two older men reading to each other as part of their friendship, and wanted to explore the qualities of their friendship and their relationships to their bodies.
So I floated this idea to Al, and he was kind of shocked. It was like, “I have to think about it.” But he was really interested. And then I went and I wrote Jim a letter about it and invited him into the project. He was like, “I'm all in.” And so the project started out being just that, that story about their relationship and their friendship and their relationships to their bodies.
As I was working on it over a number of months, I more and more realized that I wanted to be telling my own story. That was difficult—navigating that; it was a big turn in the film. But I had gone through this—after my husband died, I met a man my age. My husband and I had stopped having sex well into the marriage, because he had was quite ill with leukemia for the last ten years of our marriage. And I basically had had this full sexual reawakening happen. I really wanted to explore that whole history and that story. I'm 60 years old, and dealing… I'm not I'm not 84 like Jim is, but there's still a lot. I was in a relationship with a man who was 84. I've really been living and exploring what it is to be to be aging and to have chronic illness, to be facing death. All of those questions. So, anyway, the film was evolving in that direction. But I wasn't filming myself at all, because it felt really important that the gaze did not get turned back on my body. I was like, “no, I am withholding my body. I am not going there.”
And over time, sharing the film out with people that I trusted, I was getting feedback like, “it feels we really want to see you.” And, “this is so much more your story. And yet you're significantly absent in this way.” So, I really struggled with it, because it had been a really conscious intellectual choice that this was only going to be my gaze on the male bodies. But I decided to explore, including myself. And so that's how the project stands now. It feels right. But it's been so interesting, experimenting around that. I feel really good about the film that I'm making. I've been sharing it with many different kinds of people, not just filmmakers, but also regular people. For a long time I thought, this is really only going to appeal to older people, because it's, you know, about their story. And then I was sharing it with younger people. I was blown away that they were like—
Daisy
Yeah, I loved it. Like, I loved it. It's one of those things, again, where it's like, no one is telling you this information. I want to know where my body will be, what my relationships, what my future could look like. I don't have those conversations. And for me personally, my grandma passed away. So I've never had someone older than I would say in their 50s talk about their sexuality. I mean, for women, it's kind of like a hush hush thing. You don't talk about your body. You don't talk about your sexuality after a certain point in your life. For the longest time, I was like, “well, are we just not going to address this?” And then that left me in a very confused state. So when I saw this, I could not stop watching it. This is why I want to get into filmmaking, to share stories and talk about narratives that are not talked about enough. I think this is a very important film, and I think you're doing an amazing job. I think you should share it with more young people, because I think this is an important story to tell. I loved it.
Sarah
Thank you, thank you. It's been really interesting too, because, through the making of the film, I've begun talking.much more deeply with my close women friends, you know, of my age. I've only had one woman friend that I've been friends with for 40 years. She's actually the one in the film that talks about having her pussy blown open. Yes. Yeah. We go back 40 years and we're really close. I always talked with her about this kind of stuff, but my other friends, even close friends, we just didn't talk about our sexuality. And, in making the film, I started doing that, and including them and, you know, telling them about it, talking about what I was going through. And they were like, so hungry for it. And we started making dates, just like these girl dates, just to get together [to have] these conversations. It's not just young people that don't know these things. They were having the same experiences with vaginismus and changes, with a lack of estrogen and changes in the vaginal tissue. Our doctors don't talk about these things. They didn't have anybody to talk to. And it was affecting their relationships with their partners. And they were so grateful to be able to talk about it.
My current partner Brad, who's in the film, is talking about having impotence—which many men suffer from, and men just don't talk about that. I so love how he's so courageous and so vulnerable in the making of the film. I just really value and appreciate his comfort level and being able to do that. He feels it's really important. And he's like, all in for it. Yeah, I'm really glad to hear your experience of it. Thank you, it feels really good.
You had asked about some of the films I've made that address death and dying, like, Transit(ive). I think you were calling that the “breath film,” about death, and Moth Print. Just to answer your question about those, like, what was my impulse in wanting to share those? The impulse to make those did not come from wanting to share anything. And I don't think that's really ever been an impulse when I've made a film. It's always either something I'm really interested in investigating, or something that I need to move through. And then whether it connects with an audience is always a later question to come.
In the Transit(ive) film, where I recorded my dad's dying breath, I made that film one week, seven days after he died. He and I were soulmates. We were very close, and I adored him, and I was with him for much of the three months of the end of his life, taking care of him and helping my mom. The last few nights, I didn't even go to bed. I was just with him the whole time. I hadn't brought my Bolex with me, although I'd thought about it, and I just impulsively wanted to record something of the experience. All I had on me was my iPhone, and I took out my iPhone and I started filming him. He was…I think it's called unconscious. But alive. And, I started filming close ups of his body, just like this section of his neck. I did these ten minute shots on the phone that were just like a little spot on his belly, and I did his cheek, and I made many of these over the course of that night and after he died. I didn't make them with any intention for anything other than my own, just having a record for myself. The night that he died, he died at 4:00 in the afternoon. And my family, we were all with him, and I wanted to have a vigil with his body, a 24 hour vigil over the night. And nobody else in my family was comfortable with that and wanted to do that, but it was okay with them if we did it. He had died at home. And so, we did that vigil and, through that night—it ended up being like a 12 or 14 hour vigil,—until the hearse came the next morning for his body. It was very powerful and very moving. I had never been at a death before. And I held the idea always that you're alive one minute and you're dead the next, like there's a last breath and then you're dead. And when I was actually with him dying, I discovered that it's not like that. Have you been with somebody dying before?
MOTH PRINT
2023. Handmade, laser-printed 16mm transferred to HD
Daisy
Cancer runs in my family. So at a young age, I was introduced to death. I've had uncles and aunts and cousins die at a relatively young age—that's why I don't know a lot of older people in my family. I have been at their deathbed. I mean, we're a family surrounding them while we're just waiting for them to pass. And so that's why, for me, when I was watching and listening to this, it brought me back into that moment. But it's also, in a sense, beautiful, because growing up, I was always taught that, yes, death is very sad, but it's also a very beautiful moment. I like to believe in reincarnation. I like to believe that we go somewhere else. I think that's also another reason why I gravitated to this piece a lot, because it's those memories that we hold on to. It's having that voice and having that memory of that person being with us. Sound is such an important part of our world. And to have those sounds, it's like I'm with that person again and they'll always be with me. And so listening back to this, I just found it so, so beautiful in the way that you embedded your father's voice. I had never thought about using any of the footage that I have of my relatives in my work. So that really inspired me to think back on that footage that I have and wonder how I can implement them into my work going forward.
Sarah
That's wonderful. I mean, those are all archives that we have, right? Our personal archives are resources for us. That reminds me about Moth Print, because Moth Print was similar. I was going back and forth from Syracuse to where I live in Massachusetts, over these three months caring for my dad, and one night I arrived home very, very late after this long drive from Syracuse. It was in the middle of the summer, and I was coming into my house, and my husband had left the front porch light on for me, and there was this huge moth called a galium sphinx moth, which is the size of a hummingbird and absolutely beautiful. I don't know if you know moths.
Daisy
I love moths. I was like, “go wild, moth!” I have this little band going with my roommate, and we were called The Moths, because we find them so amazing.
Sarah
That's so cool. Well, so this gorgeous moth was dive bombing the front porch light over and over and over again. And I was walking in the house, and I saw it, and I was just transfixed. It was like, there was my experience and my dad's experience being enacted by this moth, of this simultaneous death drive and life drive. Because going toward that light was going to kill it.
But it was the draw toward light, it was experiencing that light is life, and it couldn't stay away from it. And it was that experience of that compulsion about not being able to let go, not being able to let go. I was like, “oh my God, I have to film this.” And all I had, again, was my iPhone and I pulled it out of my pocket. And I filmed the moth with no idea that I would ever be able to use it. After my dad died, I knew I had to make a film out of that. It just so expressed the whole experience. And, not wanting to work in video anymore, I was like, how am I going to get this onto film? And that's when I thought about making it into a laser printed film. I guess it's considered a cameraless film from the 16 millimeter viewpoint. So, there's another example where I didn't get hung up about, it's not going to be beautiful or it's not… I really care about making beautiful images. That's really important to me. But, it wasn't important in this case. I was like, this is about something else, and how can I transform this material that I have into something that can speak this story?
Would you like to hear about the process, because you'd asked about cameraless filmmaking?
Daisy
Of course. I had never heard of cameraless. And I was like, what does this mean?
Sarah
There's many different methods for making cameraless films. I've made work with collage. I've made images with snake skins, and sheep hair, and drawing on film. One thing I love doing is you can take plastic food bags, like the plastic bag around a loaf of bread. And you put it on top of clear leader, which is the base of 16 millimeter film before the emulsion has been put onto it. It’s just clear plastic. So you get that, you put that down, you put the plastic bag on top of that, a paper bag over that, and then you iron with a clothes iron, and you transfer the image that's on the plastic bag onto the film. You can make really gorgeous images that way. And the physical matter goes outside the image frame and onto the sound. The sound track that goes down the side makes optical sound when it goes through the projector. And so you're making a soundtrack at the same time that you're making an image track. And that's really cool and really interesting. You can work with rhythm and all kinds of things with the sound.
Daisy
That's amazing. I am very eager to get my hands on film. Everyone here is like, “no, don't do film. It's expensive, it's too much work.” But I want to experience it, because I love hands-on. Like I love being able to craft stuff, make things. It means so much more than just having a camera. I'm so grateful to be taking this course, because we were watching this film [Naomi Uman’s Removed]. There is a body of a woman, and they used nail polish to kind of trace her. And I was like, wow, this is amazing, using your own creativity to do these changes. Don't get me wrong, I love editing on my computer, but it's just understanding that there's other methods and there's other materials that you can use, and recycled material—that is what amazes me. At work, we were using tape and there were always extra strands that were being left over, because I was making labeling, and I kept saving the item. My boss is like, “why are you doing this?” And I'm like, “well, it's extra tape. I could make something out of those.” My mind is changing, because now I'm seeing different ways that I can make things. And now my brain is being shifted like, “oh, I have this extra material, I have this that I can use to make this.”
Sarah
There's so much joy in it. And it's funny, because kids can make films this way. I teach workshops and it's easy and it's fun. It's about the process and not just the product. And exploring and playing and having fun and using what's on hand. That's a feminist value.
Daisy
I'm 23, and I would like to ask you: if you could give your 23 year old self any advice, what would it be?
Sarah
I think relationships matter. Cultivate them and play. Let yourself play. Go for the joy. Yeah
Daisy
I love that and I'm experiencing that, and I value that so much. Now that I'm graduating, I'm going to miss my friends. I'm going to miss working with them. It's just so amazing to create these friendships through filmmaking, and just play with your friends. I think it's important to always have that childlike mind to continue creating and continue being creative and just always enjoy what you do. That, to me, is something that I value—waking up every day and being like, I love what I do, I love what I'm making, and I love having people that are surrounding me nourishing that and bouncing off of each other's amazing vibes. Because I value the people who value me. Something that I'm learning is keeping those people close. So I really, really appreciate you saying that. I think going to UCSC and transferring, it's very scary, because you don't know anyone, and it's like having to just jump into the pool when other people have been doing this a lot longer. It’s very, very scary, because you feel like you have to start running this race that people have already started. I think it's been very important for me to always ask for help. It's always teamwork.
Sarah
Yeah. And it takes a lot of strength and courage to ask for help. It's a strong person that can do that. So you've got a lot going for you, Daisy. It's been such a joy talking with you, and I feel your passion, and your smarts and your excitement, your open mind and learning. Your relational skills are really, really evident. That's so much going for you. However you choose to apply all that, you're going to succeed.
Daisy
Thank you for being the artist that you are. Because for people like me, I think it's very important to see people like you, because then I'm like, wow, like this is possible. I can do this because you're doing it. And that's amazing.
Sarah
So what are the next steps for you? What happens after graduation?
Daisy
I want to continue honing in on my skills. I want to continue making films. I don't know what exactly that looks like. I just want to keep exploring. A lot of the time it's only like three women in a room full of 15 men, including the professor. So, I think that's also one of the reasons why I'm pushing forward. I just want to see more representation. I want to know that there's more women in the room. Representation is a big thing for me. And, going forward, I just think that's one of the reasons why I really want to get into this industry, to be one of those people who can be in a room full of men and be like, “no, that is wrong.”
Sarah
You're very clear on what, what your intention is and what's important to you and what you're sharing is that the form of that is less important. But the core values are what you're holding on to.
I think something tells me that you can do that.