An Interview with Sarah Li
We spoke to Sarah Li about their film Opening the Closet Doors, a creative response to LGBTQ stories in the archives at Darlington Hippodrome – our Women X 2022 venue – made in collaboration with local LGBTQ people. They talk us through their filmmaking journey, queer histories, and working with archival material.
What has your filmmaking journey been like so far? When did you start making films?
My filmmaking journey has been really fun and also rocky, with lots of little challenges that I have figured out mostly for myself. I have approached filmmaking in a very DIY way and have only had slightly more formal mentorship in the technical side of making films in the past year as part of the Dover Art Prize Creative Award, which was funded by County Durham Community Foundation.
My filmmaking has very much been centred in the visual art world and has usually been shown within art-type or community spaces. Showing films in more unusual settings generally suits me and the work that I make because I don’t make clear narrative or documentary cinema pieces, and so I prefer unusual spaces so that the audience doesn’t necessarily have the same expectations that they might have for cinema pieces. But, to me, music, film, art, craft, theatre, etc. all really speak to each other and overlap in huge ways. I kind of just see myself as a maker, and being a filmmaker or moving image artist is a part of that.
I started making video art when I was in my final year at Newcastle University on the Fine Art course, which was at the end of 2016. Since then I have done short video works with live performances, and a longer film piece, Calves, Hair, Her, which was in collaboration with Petra Szeman and Edwin Li for Microprojects at the Star and Shadow Cinema. This was a longer art and music film.
How did the idea for Opening the Closet Doors come about?
Opening the Closet Doors was inspired by a mix of things. I had wanted to explore and research some archival material for a long time and I often get frustrated by the erasure or lack of a presence of LGBTQ+ histories, so I started to think about developing a piece of work with other people that could explore some of those themes.
I saw an open call for emerging social artists called Flourish, which was funded by Creative Darlington, and so I presented the idea to them that I would explore archival material for LGBTQ+ stories with an LGBTQ+ identifying historian and a group of LGBTQ+ people and we would make a film together. I was really excited by it because I had visited Darlington before and thought it was a really interesting place that I could explore more. I was fortunate enough to get that support from Creative Darlington and then found an excellent partner in the Darlington Hippodrome, who have a huge archive to uncover.
After that, the project started to be shaped by the connection between theatre and sexuality, LGBTQ+ history, and the voices of the local LGBTQ+ co-authors and myself. I also managed to get some Arts Council funding to support the project and had amazing mentorship from Helix Arts. I found excellent partners in LGBT+ NSG, SAN North East, and, last but not least, you at Rianne Pictures!
What challenges have you faced with this particular project?
One challenge that I have found is in trying to present LGBTQ+ histories. It can be quite a complex subject matter to tackle because the language around LGBTQ+ identities has gone through a lot of change itself, so identifying people from the past with our contemporary terms is not necessarily ideal. Also, we have made a lot of presumptions about historic people’s identities that may not be accurate.
For instance, people often assume if someone who was assigned male at birth marries someone assigned female at birth then they must be straight and cisgender. Therefore, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, intersex, queer, and trans-identifying people often get forgotten about when these kinds of presumptions are being made (people also can make this assumption when they see a same-sex couple and assume they must be gay or lesbian).
There has also been a history of criminalisation and pathologisation of LGBTQ+ folks, so it is not surprising that people would sometimes stay firmly in the closet to avoid arrest or social isolation. This means that a lot of our histories have been actively erased or suppressed, so sometimes we have to literally decode them to uncover them.
There is an additional layer of complication because even if you are in the closet, it doesn't make you less LGBTQ+, so it is about honouring people without crossing those boundaries of their private lives. I have found myself asking ethical questions about whether it is okay to platform historic figures who were not ‘out’ during their lifetime and particularly if they were wrongly ‘outed’ and were not happy about it – I recently found out that Shakespeare was actually what we might call bisexual or pansexual, and his private sonnets that were written about both men and women were published during his lifetime and he was not happy about this. Part of me feels bad about speaking about his LGBTQ+ identity, but then part of me thinks there is enough distance and time from his life to now, and to erase the LGBTQ+ identity from one of the most famous people to come out of this country would also be problematic. So, my main aim for the film is that I would really like to throw some questions about the presumed identities of the historic figures, materials, and stories that we have been looking at.
Image credit: Edwin Li
Opening the Closet Doors is a very collaborative project — is your work usually like that, or is this something new for you?
I do really enjoy working collaboratively and I don’t have one set medium. I like working in film and video, music, performance, and theatre and these different types of media are usually, in some way, pretty collaborative. It feels natural to open it into more of a social art project where people can contribute their voices and the aims are centred around community-building and expression.
I think I generally prefer working with other people as I find it quite exciting and chaotic in a good way. Building the relationships as well as the work feels really satisfying as an LGBTQ+ person and wanting to find my community in a broad sense – outside of nightclubs as well as in them! I also like that even if I present a project and find the funding, etc., I am never sure exactly what the outcome will be at the end because the people involved really do shape and contribute to the project in a huge way. I can’t stress enough that this is not solely my work even though I am the mouthpiece for the project. Here is a little bit more about the people involved:
The co-authors are the people who are creating the content for the film and around the film. We have been working together, looking at the archival material, and coming up with creative responses to what we have found in there! Mike is a non-binary, northern-based concept artist. Basil is a trans man who grew up in Darlington and draws informational, fun illustrations that bring the fantastical to life. Sofia Barton is a Punjabi artist from the northeast who is inspired by nature and heritage. Lizzie Lovejoy is a story-telling artist based in the northeast of England and explores the heart and soul of this region, observing, writing, and visually interpreting our stories and histories using a mix of illustration and written works. Luke Myer is a local councillor in Redcar and Cleveland and the founder of LGBTees, a Teesside LGBT+ support group. Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer is a mixed media artist, writer, performer, and researcher.
Edwin Li is the composer for the film, but he has been working in collaboration for some parts of the music. I ran a visual score workshop with a couple of the team from LGBT+ NSG (one of our partners on the project) where we all made visual scores (visual representations of music which we based on some things of interest from the archive). Edwin will be using some of these visual scores to make music for the film. Beki Eaton and Cat Hurst-McGahey are both contributing their musical scores to be interpreted for the film. They are both part of the team working at LGBT+ NSG, which is a group for the LGBTQ+ community in northern England and Scotland.
Stella Dixon will be doing the main bulk of the cinematography for this project. She has a lot of technical experience working in film and is an amazing filmmaker in her own right, so she will be there to support me and the other co-authors in making our film a reality.
Historian James Davison has helped identify LGBTQ+ materials in the archive and has also helped contextualise those materials. James Davison is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool, where his research focuses on examining the evidence surrounding trans lives in the early medieval past.
What’s it’s been like using archives for your research? Is this something you’ve had much experience with before?
I have absolutely loved working with archival material. It’s full of all kinds of stories that could go down a million different paths and so I think it is fair to say that myself and the other co-authors involved in the project haven’t been stuck for inspiration!
I have had some experience working with archives before as a creative producer for artist Lady Kitt. We worked on a project with Warwickshire County Record Office and Arts and Heritage recently as part of a Meeting Point commission. This project has a similar overarching theme of uncovering LGBTQ+ histories. It was a total coincidence that I was planning Opening the Closet Doors when I was first told about Lady Kitt’s project and invited onto it as a producer, but Kitt’s approach to the Warwickshire project has massively informed and inspired my approach. The structures for that project that we built together have very much been applied to this project.
I also just really love using research and historical pieces as inspiration or references for my work generally. I am not really sure why, exactly, but I think it just allows me to get really nerdy and into whatever the work is focused on at that time and definitely takes the creative responses in new directions.
Image credit: Stella Dixon
Are there any other elements of queer history you’d like to explore in future works?
I definitely want to explore the LGBTQ+ connection with horror a little bit more. It would also be really great to see more about the history of drag king practice in the UK. Drag queens are coming to the fore and being recognised in popular culture, and the histories of drag queen practice are starting to be written about and shared more widely, which is great, but drag kings are still very much underground performers. It’s quite hard to access our history, or even know where our reference points come from, and I would really love to fill some of those gaps in my own knowledge as it is a practice that I am part of myself. But, for my next project, I am hoping to focus my attention on queer walking practices by developing a music and performance piece that I created a few years ago called Opera du Mal, which was a music and performance interpretation of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He was the art theorist who popularised the walking art practice of ‘flânerie’.
Which female or non-binary filmmakers working today do you particularly admire?
Celine Sciamma – I love Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It is so bittersweet and the use of music in it is perfect. I also love the underwater shots in her film Water Lilies.
Chantal Ackerman unfortunately isn’t alive anymore, but I have included her because she is still a recent filmmaker and I just absolutely love her work. I find her films poetic, delicate, and direct.
Zanele Muholi is an artist working in video, photography, and installation. I absolutely love their work and wrote about their documentary Difficult Love for part of my dissertation at university. The film is about LGBTQ+ love in South Africa, specifically focusing on Black lesbians and their stories.
Rebecca Sugar is an amazing non-binary creator and is responsible for my favourite cartoons, having a hand in Adventure Time and then going on to be the creator of Steven Universe. Not only that, but their songs, which they put into their series and films, are so good.
Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman is an absolutely brilliant film and one that I have been thinking about a lot during this project, specifically thinking about the difficulty of uncovering LGBTQ+ and minority histories, and how we find those stories and present them.
Lastly, I recently saw a film at Losing the Plot film festival called A Night of Knowing Nothing by Payal Kapadia. I really loved the film and so I am looking forward to looking at some more of her work.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone at the start of their creative journey, what would it be?
It is less advice but more something that I wish I had known or been told previously: you can have loads of interests and they can all be your work if you want them to be. There is nothing wrong with not having one sole craft, but instead having lots of different things that you do. I never really felt like I could approach filmmaking from the traditional channels, so I never felt like it was somewhere that I could fit in. But, now, I am lucky enough to have the freedom to explore different media depending on what feels best for the project and that can be an exciting way to work. So, I guess I am saying that if the traditional route doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean that there are no other options to still explore film and filmmaking.
Also, you can work in an interdisciplinary way if you want to and that can really work and has its own benefits and pitfalls. If this type of work interests you, I would highly recommend talking to people whose work you enjoy and asking them what their path into making work has been. I am sure you will find a lot of people who ended up coming into the various arts in lots of different ways.
Opening the Closet Doors screens at Darlington Hippodrome at 7.30pm on August 11. You can buy tickets, on a pay-what-you-can basis, here.
Interview edited by Emily Garbutt.
