Angeline Gragasin Talks Her Short Film Myself When I Am Real

Angeline Gragasin’s canny, touching short film Myself When I Am Real presents itself as a circa-2000 home video unearthed from the vaults. But its MiniDV aesthetic, as simple as it is on the surface, is part of something far more complex. Gragasin’s is a film that in its short 18 minutes raises a set of probing questions about identity and assimilation, inviting its viewers to reflect on their own relationships and memories.

Myself When I Am Real finds single mother Annette (Therese Dizon) and her shy teen daughter Jasmine (Lianah Sta. Ana) arriving at the home of a Filipino woman, Mercedes (Tina Chilip) and her friends for a Christmas party in the year 2000. Annette and Jasmine are not relatives of the host family; they’re barely acquaintances. But in their Eastern Wisconsin suburb, parties like Mercedes’ provide crucial connections for a community of people with a shared heritage. Of course, parties are also occasions for first impressions, as Annette fears and young Jasmine finds out—all too painfully.

Gragasin’s use of the era-appropriate MiniDV cams for the shoot lends a veneer of authenticity to Myself When I Am Real, the technique looking and feeling like observational documentary cinema. Yet to be clear, the film is a fiction, one that intentionally and artfully—even sometimes comically—blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction.

Gragasin, raised herself in Wisconsin by her mother, who had immigrated as an adult from the Philippines, relies on both her own childhood memories and her adult reflections for the content of Myself When I Am Real. Her films have screened at BAM, Clermont-Ferrand, ZINEBI, Palais de Tokyo, Jumping Frames, and more. She teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City. As Myself When I Am Real continues its international festival run, she spoke to Film Obsessive publisher J Paul Johnson about the film’s inception, production, and reception.

The transcript following the video below has been edited for space and clarity.

Film Obsessive: I’m excited to talk about your film. You’ve been very busy, it sounds like, on the festival circuit. Where has the film been and what kind of reception have you garnered?

Angeline Gragasin: Yeah, we’ve had an amazing festival run so far. I just got back from CAAMfest Center for Asian American Media Festival in San Francisco, preparing to play at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival next month. And at some of my favorite festivals, I’ve noticed the film has been programmed alongside hybrid films. We played at the New/Next Film Festival last fall. This was actually my favorite. My film is a longer short, and they programmed us beside a shorter feature (A Man Imagined) by a filmmaking duo called Cassidy and Shatzki and theirs was a hybrid doc film—a documentary film that had some fictional elements. And my film, as you know, is a fictional film that has documentary elements, or you could call it an autofictional film.

It was really amazing to be in dialogue with just one film to allow the audience to focus more on my film in relation to this other film. Women Make Waves International Film Festival in Taipei also programmed me in this way. I think that’s a really exciting way to present the work in terms of its formal qualities. I mean, I must admit, I feel like pigeonholing it as a coming of age film or like an Asian film or a Filipino film has been somewhat frustrating for me because the hope is that it’s so much more than that. But I’ve had a great time so far and the shorts block we’re playing in Palm Springs is called “Life of the Party.” They haven’t announced the lineup yet, but I imagine the film will be played alongside other short films having to do with parties, which also I find very intriguing, and I’m excited to see that program.

That sounds fascinating. You say you might not wish for the film to be pigeonholed as, say, a coming of age film or an Asian film, et cetera. Yet It is those things, and it is far more than those things. You also describe it as an autofiction, which is an interesting term. Can I have you, for our audience, in the most efficient way you can, describe what the film is and does?

Yes. Well, autofiction, I mean, that term has only recently found its way into the cinematic discourse, and it comes from literary criticism, an autobiographical work with fictional elements or that is somewhat fictionalized. So, in many ways, my film is based on my own lived experience, and therefore is autobiographical to some extent, but also very, very heavily fictionalized. But the film is about a mother and daughter who attend a Christmas party in suburban Wisconsin. It’s a Filipino Christmas party specifically, and it’s shot on MiniDV in the style of a home movie. So, the idea is we’re getting this slice of life glimpse into this dysfunctional Filipino Christmas party, shifting perspective between the mother and child.

It’s really charming and it’s really funny. I had a couple of really good laughs at it and it’s also a very insightful treatment of the relationship between mother and daughter as they’re in a new place. It’s set in suburban Wisconsin. Is that where you’re from?

Yes. I grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, which is just south of Milwaukee. It’s almost on the border of Wisconsin and Illinois on Lake Michigan.

And can I ask to what extent the film is or is not autobiographical?

That’s a very good question. To what extent? Well, I am Filipino American, I mean, American born to a Filipino immigrant single mother, as are the characters in the film. I grew up going to parties like the one depicted in the film. Um, now, the occupation of the mother, that’s where the similarities end and details, I think that were written into the film for character development, just for the purposes of storytelling, there are some embellishments there. But I guess the quality of the relationship and the environment that you’re seeing, that is very much rooted in my own lived experience and true to life, I would say.

Okay. The entire film is set in one single party over the course of what, perhaps a few hours?

Yes. So you get to see, you know, a little bit during the day and then sunsets and you see, you know, it continues on into the night. And it’s a period piece that takes place in the year 2000. So all very accurate.

And did that setting have something to do with why you went to the MiniDV home media style of shooting?

Yes. So when I had written this, I wasn’t sure what camera I wanted to shoot it on. I didn’t quite have the visual style fully developed. Until at some point, I thought, I think I’d like for this to look and feel like a home movie, like an authentic archival home movie that was unearthed, a tape that you found that hadn’t been played since 2000. I brought this to my DP, Yujin Yohe, and he said, “Oh, that’s a great idea, but in the year 2000 people weren’t shooting on VHS anymore, people were shooting on MiniDV. Would you consider that?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. Of course.”

Rather than shooting on a consumer level camera for maximum authenticity—because we know this is a fictional film that’s going to have a theatrical release—we wanted to increase the production value. He proposed shooting on the same camera that Thomas Vinterberg shot Festen (aka A Celebration) on. That camera is the Canon Excel II. So we shot on MiniDV as per Yujin’s suggestion, which I really, really loved, and we did not the one thing we did not do that Thomas Vinterberg does, is transpose that to 35mm film. It’s just the raw tape, what you’re seeing purely out of the camera with no visual effects, no color correction. So all of those glitches and artifacts or happened organically in camera. But I see that as a happy accident and it gives texture and grain and adds to the film’s archival quality and the authenticity of feeling like, “Okay, this is a real home movie tape with all of its imperfections.”

Is it a one-camera shoot, then?

Yes.

Let me focus on editing that footage because you’re doing a lot of work here to do things that a director not shooting in this style would not do. You would not have the camera person be present in the diegesis of the film and told to get out of the way. Can you talk a little bit about how mindful you are of this visual design when you are both shooting and editing the project?

That’s a really great question, and I’m so glad you asked about it. Yes, I was very intentional with choreographing. Well, it wasn’t totally choreographed. There’s a lot of improvisation and spontaneity from the performers. But, Yujin and I made a decision, my DP and I, that the perspective of the camera person is a character in the film—in the diegesis of the film, as you say. We decided not to name this person because it wasn’t relevant to the story, you know, who is behind the camera. We wanted to just look and feel like they were another guest at the party, which is what allowed you to have that level of access and intimacy, seeing things, private moments, that a professional camera person might not have access to.

And, we did a lot of rehearsals with the actors where we’re trying to not only capture the action for storytelling so that you can understand what a character’s motivations are or see their reaction at a certain moment, et cetera. But we also did a lot of work to mimic the quality of amateur videography or of a home movie cameraperson. Meaning, at some point I realized after we rehearsed enough times, Yujin had started to anticipate the actions because they’re scripted. And a lot of my direction on set was, “Don’t anticipate. You don’t know what’s going to happen next, so there needs to be a delay.” When you’re moving the camera, if action happens over here, over there, you know, you can’t follow the action. There always needs to be a delayed reaction, and it just needs to feel more spontaneous and organic. A lot of the choreography Yujin and I were doing were one, following the action for storytelling purposes, and then two, inhabiting the perspective of the camera person as a character, discovering moments for the first time and following it as like a documentary cinematographer, would without knowing in advance.

It leads to some marvelous moments in the film with some action taking place outside what the normal perspective of the party would be. We look for instance, at a conversation on a couch between two people who are dancing, we do a little bit of eavesdropping there. We go under the table for one important detail, and then at the end, there’s a climactic moment that happens offscreen doing just exactly what you described, the camera has to follow and catch up with a sound that’s important. All of that is really cool.

Was Vinterberg a model for you or were there other films or filmmakers that you look to in thinking this through?

Well, Vinterberg was Yujin’s reference. I had actually never seen the film before he brought it up, and I think he brought it up because it’s also about a party that goes wrong, and that takes place all in one location. And so, we watched that as a reference for this film.

But, zooming out in general, I’m very much attracted to fiction films that feel like documentary and documentaries that feel like fiction. So films that just blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, I would say my greatest influence and biggest inspiration is Agnes Varda. She made her whole career of moving between fiction and nonfiction—before we had this thing called hybrid film. She was already experimenting with that. And she was one of the first filmmakers to adopt MiniDV, also, I think, about 2000, so she’s a huge inspiration to me, and I was fortunate enough to be able to interview her in 2017, which was a meaningful and life-changing, transformative experience, [given] her approach to perspective and the conflict between reality and artifice, private and public.

All of that has influenced me as a storyteller. I’m very drawn to films that are about public and private self image or our relationship to our own image. Those are themes that are present in her work, and also structurally, how she tells the story is she’s very rigorous in the screenwriting. That’s a huge influence to me as well.

And so, that’s an interesting journey. You were a suburban Wisconsin kid some 25 years ago, now making your way as an accomplished filmmaker through the festival circuit. What’s your journey been like?

Well, I fell into filmmaking by accident. I loved movies growing up, but it never occurred to me that I myself could make movies, could become a filmmaker. I didn’t know anyone who was a filmmaker, and I’m a millennial. I came of age during the digital revolution. So we were still shooting on MiniDV and films with theatrical release were still all shot on 35, and it just seemed like this faraway foreign alien world impenetrable and very exclusive and inaccessible to someone like me. But I had a really amazing education in Wisconsin. I went to a really small K-12 school. I went there through age seven to 17, and it had a huge influence on me because I had a really incredible fine and performing arts program. I was exposed to a lot of different media and a lot of different international artists and traditions, not only in the visual arts, but in music and theater. So, I studied a lot of different ways of making as a child. And then, I ended up going to the University of Chicago for my undergraduate degree, where I majored in interdisciplinary studies in the humanities.

Was that with an eye towards filmmaking or was that art form that you came at still later?

It was much later. So at Chicago, my concentration was theater and performance studies. And I focused on avant-garde Polish theater making, experimental theater. I was studying [Jerzy] Grotowski, I was studying Tadeusz Kantor and then I was also studying Commedia dell’arte and studying training with theater artists who had trained at Jacques Lecoq. So that was really my focus as a performer, but also as a writer and a director. It’s a very interdisciplinary craft. That’s the foundation, I would say, for my practice as a filmmaker.

And then I just randomly fell into it. I was cast in an Indie feature by an emerging filmmaker in Chicago. And I had so much fun, but I thought, “Oh, I really want to be on the other side of the camera. That seems much more interesting to me.” And my favorite part about filmmaking is collaboration. Just it’s essential. It’s necessary. You must collaborate to make a film. And so that’s what drew me to filmmaking. Just by collaborating with other young filmmakers, other kids who had themselves gone to film school and had had training, I learned by doing.

And then many years later, once I realized, okay, “I would like to make this my career, and this is my passion,” I went and studied and got an MFA in screenwriting, which I felt like was the only aspect of filmmaking that I really wasn’t able to master or focus on in the field. I couldn’t really self teach. I wanted formal instruction. I do have an MFA in screenwriting and screenwriting is my favorite part of the filmmaking process.

You know, you mentioned that filmmaking is your passion, but it’s very clearly also your talent as well. It’s very evident in Myself When I Am Real. I just wanted to conclude by asking what is the future that you foresee for it?

Myself When I Am Real was originally written as a feature film. So, there is a feature version of this of the same name. I initially wrote this in grad school, the first draft of the feature, and then the pandemic hit and things slowed down. As I was developing the feature, I had the idea to—as many filmmakers do—develop a short to use as a proof-of-concept or a work sample for the feature film. So, that still exists. I learned a lot in the process of making the short that now I can apply, go back to the feature and apply when I revise that project, which is still in development.

I have many other projects in development as well. My next film is actually set in Paris. I’m working with a French producer right now. I kind of press pause on Myself When I Am Real to focus on seeing the short through festivals and developing this other project in France. But I’d love to return to the feature, and I would love to—of course!—direct it and produce it and see it into the world. It’s a matter of timing and finding value-aligned collaborators, which, you know, is very much out of my control.

I understand and know well the challenge! I  want to thank you for bringing us these 18 minutes of Myself When I Am Real. I hope other members of our viewing and reading audience get an opportunity to see it as it continues its festival run. Who knows, maybe in the future, a little ways down your path, we’ll get the opportunity to see that other version of it realized as well. Thank you, Angeline, for joining us at Film Obsessive today. And good luck to you and it as it continues its festival run.

Thank you so much, Paul.