WHAT'S REVENGE

I made a movie about revenge because I didn’t understand it. At the time, I was living in Hong Kong, so I was watching a lot of vengeance films, and was consistently struck by the sentiment of utter “rightness” and purity of action. This “rightness” I noticed wasn’t like righteousness to me- it felt different- more like a strange assuredness of a singular, personal reality.

I approached my friend Erica as a subject and collaborator. Her sense of humor and stories about men and relationships always contained that sense of “rightness” I heard in vengeance films. I wanted to present her stories as if she was utterly “in the right" about what happened to her. I was curious about how this purposefully skewed subjectivity would look when contrasted with notions of power, particularly the exploitation of gender in contemporary power dynamics. I saw a silliness there that I wanted to play with. Similarly, I wanted to explore the humor of attempting to control a situation, whether a conversation with another person, or the outcome of an entire film.

As we began shooting, Erica became apprehensive about the implications of the project. She wanted to tell her stories, but wavered when it came to formulating the acts of reckoning. Most of all, she realised that being open and vulnerable on camera was more than she had bargained for. I decided to utilize her real life withdrawal and weave it into a more controlled plot. Instead of documenting Erica and her interactions with the men in her stories, we chose to look at our own relationship while pursuing the film and its ideas. We worked from what had already been shot, and expanded the story by creating new scenes based on how the film was actually making us feel.

The result is WHAT’S REVENGE: a multi-layered, docu-fiction film about relationships, vulnerability, and the subtleties of revenge. The film blends reenactment of actual events, fantasized scenarios inspired by real events, real people and their own stories, and actors representing real people while incorporating their own stories. Shot on a micro-budget, we wrapped production in March 2015. The film was made by an entirely female executive crew, which hadn’t been an objective, but turned out to be an essential aspect of the film’s creation. We relished the opportunity create a film on our terms, leaning fully toward what felt most aggressively feminine, funny, and familiar to our own lives. I believe we have created an utterly one-of-a-kind film and I hope it finds an audience that feels the same way.