For limited time of one month, Girls in Film is proud to present the first feature film published on our website.

The core of the story in this debut feature by director Tess Harrison is centered around the relationship between two siblings, Max and Eve - played by the director and her real life brother Will Harrison. The film lives in an uncomfortable space between childhood and adulthood while Eve and Max try to have a relationship without their mother.

We’ve worked together before with success and this film pushed us to explore our real life sibling relationship via the foils of Max and Eve. The character are decidedly not us, but we share a shorthand as actors and siblings that creates an inimitable tension on screen, says Harrison and continues - I wanted to create an experience for the audience that is comforting in its familiar family dynamics, and also bizarre in it’s meta-fictionalized version of reality.I’m interested in the mundane but potent transformations that women experience every day. As a filmmaker I’m trying to articulate and illuminate these moments on screen. During the writing process of This Is A Film About My Mother, I kept coming back to Britt Marling’s NY Times op-ed, "I Don’t Want To Be The Strong Female Lead," the idea that classic story structure is inherently male, and might not serve to tell the story of our lead character Eve. Her struggle, and ultimate change is internal but I think that acknowledging loss with her is a heroic journey of its own.

The film is set in Ithaca NY, where the Harrisons actually grew up, surrounded by the dark, cold palette of upstate New York. The film is a love-letter to this small town—a children’s book come to life, set against a surreal and starkly beautiful world. The post industrial, economically sad realities of upstate NY reflects Eve’s arrested development. There is also a visual juxtaposition between the characters feeling stifled in their tiny childhood home and the epic exterior worlds like Ithaca Falls and Cayuga Lake.