[Editor’s Note: the post below appeared yesterday at The Huffington Post.]
By Govindini Murty. It’s a welcome development to see more women directors emerging in the indie film scene and it’s my hope that this will soon translate into more women directing studio features, as well. We all know the statistics: the most recent studies reveal that women only direct 5% of the top 100 studio features – and yet in the indie film world, they direct 18% of the narrative features and 39% of the documentaries.
One indie woman director whose work I’ve enjoyed in recent years is Kat Coiro. Coiro’s latest film, the stylish, Italy-set romantic drama And While We Were Here, opens this weekend in select theaters and is also available on VOD. The film stars Kate Bosworth, Iddo Goldberg, and Jamie Blackley and features a voice-over by the great Claire Bloom.
Shot on location in beautiful southern Italy, And While We Were Here tells the tale of a neglected wife, Jane (Bosworth), who falls for a bohemian American youth, Caleb (Blackley), when her emotionally-remote viola player husband Leonord (Goldberg) is invited to perform in a concert in Naples.
The film is the latest in a tradition of stories about travelers whose lives are transformed by Italy. Bosworth and Goldberg give strong, sensitive performances as the troubled couple Jane and Leonard, while Blackley is disarmingly amusing as the Dionysian youth who disrupts everyone’s carefully ordered lives. Bloom (Jane’s Grandma Eves) provides a poignant voice-over commentary through tape-recorded interviews that recount her loves and losses during WWII.
I caught And While We Were Here at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012 and had the chance to chat with Kat Coiro a few months later at the LA Film Festival where she was screening her charming short film Departure Date. A romantic comedy starring Nicky Whelan and Ben Feldman, Departure Date (see photo below) is the first film shot and edited entirely at 35,000 feet – an innovative effort made possible by Virgin Produced and highly worth viewing the next time you’re on Virgin Airlines.
Coiro and I talked at the LA Film Festival about the importance of emotional honesty in storytelling, the joys of poetry, and the importance of creating films that honor brilliant women both past and present. The interview has been edited for length.
GM: I noticed in Departure Date and also in And While We Were Here that there’s a real romanticism to these films, that they breathe with a heartfelt, poetic spirit. What draws you to these sorts of stories?
KC: I appreciate simplicity and I find that creativity often flourishes within the constraints of doing these very small projects in a very short time – and making them something people can relate to. So I wrote both of these stories knowing I had to keep them very simple and I didn’t have time to get very flashy. You strip it down to what people enjoy: which is human connection, relationships, character-driven pieces. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Talking About Women’s Roles with Director Kat Coiro of And While We Were Here