Sundance 2021: Natalie Chao
Natalie Chao talks us through the making of her short film, To Know Her, an exploration of the camera's gaze and her relationship with her mother. She chats to us about memory, family, and what we can learn from the pandemic.
What inspired you to make this film?
Around 2015, my dad decided to suddenly digitalise my family’s entire archive of VHS/DV-Camcorder videos. He didn’t explain why, maybe he didn’t know himself at the time — but I was still studying in LA at the time (at USC), and this set off an entire journey of memory searching. My first watching of the tapes was extremely emotional, the only way I could think of responding at the time was in a sort of stream-of-consciousness writing, sort of like a poem. A year or so later, I made a short film called SEARCHING FOR HER, which essentially was a first attempt to form a dialogue with my mother, who passed away 10 years ago at the time of writing. A few years after, I made this first short. I noticed my questions had changed quite a bit – and my emotions towards my mother have always been difficult to articulate. A new question emerged when I visited her niche during my home visits to Hong Kong. A quote my dad had picked is inscribed: ‘to know her is to love her’. I remember googling this and discovering that it was also lyrics from a Beatles song, and asked him if she was a fan. He said no. I wouldn’t have known what music she listened to, and the more this sunk in, my fears of not remembering her were overcome with a fear of not knowing much about her at all. I started to feel obsessed with understanding who she was before she was my mother. And who she must be now that she lives only in memory and my own fictionalisation of her.
Still from To Know Her
Tell us about your unexpected challenges during the filmmaking journey?
I’m not sure if this would count as unexpected, but there was definitely a lot of emotional obstacles while editing the film. In the summer of 2018, my family visited me in LA from Hong Kong, and my sister found my mother’s old DV-Cam. I told her to bring it over and even though it was half broken, we managed to shoot an hour’s worth of tape. Back then I was still figuring out what questions I wanted to ask — so a lot of that footage was captured without the intention to make a film or anything. But after they left, and I was left with all this footage, I had to confront a lot of complicated and unresolved feelings towards my mother. It wasn’t just about reliving memories or feeling nostalgia or loss. Grief is so ambiguous at times, and not always associated with a physical absence of someone. Holding the same camera she held, and filming my family now after so much time had passed, made me sometimes feel like we were all connected again. But then there are the moments in the editing room where you feel like you’re stuck in a rabbit hole of pixelated and blurry images. It’s easy to get lost in there. I got through these moments by allowing myself time. It helped that I was making this independently and outside of any expectations or any sort of ‘production’ context. The film began and ended on a very small scale and this was probably the only way I could have told such a personal story.
Getting your film into Sundance is exciting! Do you have a favourite Sundance film?
In the doc realm, I am such an admirer of Nanfu Wang’s films. Her film, Hooligan Sparrow, remains one of the most captivating and important films I’ve seen. I’m really looking forward to seeing her latest documentary, In The Same Breath, premiere at this year’s festival. Another Sundance film that deeply impacted me is Kirstin Johnson’s Cameraperson – it challenged and redefined the doc genre for me completely, especially during a time when I was struggling to understand the ethics behind holding a camera, and what the female gaze meant, or did it even exist? To witness another cinematographer ask herself these sometimes unanswerable questions and then translate this onto the screen through her incredible body of work and her unique lens… the entire experience was spellbinding and very poetic.
Still from To Know Her
What was your first ever short film?
In film school, as part of my junior thesis, I actually made a short that was also very tied to my family’s experience of loss. It was a fictional work and the experience was pretty important to my growth as a filmmaker, however painful. The production and logistical side of it definitely collided with the emotional – and at that time I was not very ready to bridge the two or draw boundaries for myself. There are still themes and relationships from that story that I would want to continue exploring in a different iteration sometime in the future. Although my work seems to have moved towards documentary, I think with themes as intimate and complicated as this it is quite hard to define what is fictional and what is not.
The pandemic has affected the industry in many ways, how have you keep motivated during the past year?
As I’ve heard some people say, the pandemic has also triggered awareness towards the many social pandemics that have existed long before 2020. I think, right now, as hard as it is to predict, plan or live up to the expectations and goals we set ourselves before this time, it also feels like the most urgent time to tell stories. If we don’t archive this moment of many moments, all these crises – personal and political, if we don’t preserve this collective memory now, how will we process all of these experiences in the future – to educate ourselves and learn? All of this is more than enough motivation to keep going. I think we all bear a certain amount of responsibility to remember.
What are your thoughts on the transition to virtual film festivals?
As someone who hasn’t had too many experiences going to film festivals physically, I will say that there’s nothing like the feeling of sitting through a curated programme with strangers and friends, getting really excited about films and talking about them all day for days. Going to a film festival really plunges you into a very passionate atmosphere, and it does take a lot of physical removal from your every day life to plug in and appreciate cinematic art in this way. It also feels like an incredible opportunity to meet others in your community you’ve never had the chance to. But funnily enough, the virtual switch has also opened up a whole new level of access that I don’t think we’ve seen before. In the past, if I had gotten into Sundance, maybe only a handful of people I know would have been able to see my film. But now I feel like I can share it with all my loved ones, and that to me is really special. I think it is still going to take a bit more experimenting for us to all know if this transition is working. I think in a time when we are all questioning how to provide openness and access to more voices, rather than just using diversity as a label or category, I look forward to us actually reinventing the landscape from within and truly breaking down these boundaries that have existed in our cultural space for far too long. It seems like Sundance is trying to push things bit by bit and I am really interested to see what they do.
Still from To Know Her
Who has inspired you in your filmmaking journey?
So many people have shaped me but I will just list them freely here, in no particular order… Naomi Kawase, Andrea Arnold, Edward Yang, Wong Kar Wai, Sofia Coppola, Kirstin Johnson, Nanfu Wang, Terrence Malick… outside of film the list goes on. The haunting words of Yiyun Li and Ruth Ozeki, and many others.
More importantly, who has supported you in your career?
My father, my sister. Who are very much the reason I make these films. All my friends in LA who I came up with in film school, without peers like them I wouldn’t have dared to pursue filmmaking and cinematography. I am very blessed to have had so many shared experiences on and off set that have given me courage to push forward in what is a very difficult path. Although now I am in Hong Kong, seemingly quite far away, I am reminded of my foundational support from loved ones as well as feeling grounded and forced to confront the many complexities of the city I grew up in.
What do you hope audiences will take away from To Know Her?
I hope they know that loss is not always physical, and that grief is deeply ambiguous. I hope that topics like mental illness and suicide are not as silenced as they are in my culture. I hope that people watch this and are reminded of their own mothers and fathers, who point the camera at the subjects that they love the most. This presence behind the frame is always going to capture my attention, and I hope it means something to others as well.
Tell us three goals you want to achieve in the next five years!
Complete my first documentary feature.
Begin an interactive, borderless project (interpret as you wish).
Reunite on projects with my film school family.
