Holly M. Kaplan Talks Her Short Film Sunflower Girl

Holly M. Kaplan is the writer-director-producer of the short film Sunflower Girl, and it’s a project near to her heart and lived experience. Her protagonist, Rosie, is a 13-year-old Chinese-American skater girl in New York City, assigned a simple task: deliver her younger sister’s forgotten lunchbox to her at school. But when she arrives there, she runs into two skater boys: one named Cooper, the other Skylar, on whom Rosie has developed a crush. It’s one that has her tempted to shirk her sibling responsibility.

With a winning performance from After Yang‘s Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja as young Rosie, Sunflower Girl charts a tension felt by many: the tug of familial duty versus the risks of young love. Kaplan taps into her own past as a child growing up in New York City and her family history as immigrants from Hong Kong who owned a Chinese laundry storefront in Brooklyn in the 1970s for the details. It’s a film that focuses on experiences that are universal and in charting the Asian American experience.

For Sunflower Girl, Kaplan was one of just six recipients of the second annual NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers) Latino Lens Narrative Short Film Incubator for Women of Color: the program awards grants for new short films, providing support and creative feedback in partnership with Netflix during development as well as guidance through post-production. As Sunflower Girl screens this week at the Woodstock Film Festival in New York, Kaplan spoke with Film Obsessive’s J Paul Johnson about the film, its production, and its festival run. The transcript following the video below has been edited for space and clarity.

Film Obsessive: Holly M. Kaplan is writer, director and producer of the short film titled Sunflower Girl. It’s going to appear this week as part of the Woodstock Film Festival in New York. Welcome to Film Obsessive. Let me ask, what’s it going to mean to you to screen your film there?

Holly M. Kaplan: Yeah, thanks. I’m really excited for our Hudson Valley premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival. I’ve spent some time up here in the Hudson Valley. I’m here right now, and I’m really excited to share it with the community here because it’s such a important event for the area.

You know, it’s a lovely film. I should have you talk a little bit about what the narrative is and does before we go further.

Sunflower Girl is a short narrative film and actually takes place in New York City, which is where I grew up. And the protagonist is a 13-year-old girl who she’s kind of, like, a novice skateboarder. And she is kind of getting into this new hobby that her mom really disapproves of. And she has a crush on the skater boy that is I guess, like her peer at school in her neighborhood in New York City, and she really wants to skate with him, and she happens to run into him what she’s doing an errand for her sister, who she has to look after, and she has to decide if she wants to sacrifice her family responsibilities to hang out with her crush finally or be a good daughter.

It’s really a charming performance from your lead actor, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, and the film is shot in a way that just really harkens back to memories of youth that I really appreciate. Is this something that just kind of came to you out of the blue? Did you script it out of personal experience or is it something you witnessed or entirely from your own imagination?

Yeah, I think it’s definitely both, I would say, it’s I feel like kind of like half and half of memories and half of like imagination based off of, like, experiences of growing up. People watching it are really remember their memories of growing up. That’s what I think is the best thing for me to hear because that’s kind of like the inspiration of the film. I was like walking around my neighborhood I grew up in downtown. And this was like during COVID quarantine like in New York City where there was nobody around at all. Like it was those videos on the Internet of it being completely desolate. That  was real. Like really scary.

And I would just like walk around where I used to go to school and I remembered all these kids who I grew up with, and these just kind of crazy things that would happen, like just being a kid in New York City and how only that would happen if you grew up there. Like, none of this could happen anywhere else. Like these kind of funny stories of that age of being a pre teen and getting up to trouble or going to the deli after school. I thought about how I didn’t think of that as something interesting when I was growing up because I thought that was just life. And yeah, and I was thinking actually, that is now that I’ve lived in several places and I had just moved back to New York, I was like, that’s actually, like a pretty distinct experience of growing up here and it reminded me of just after school.

And then I started having the idea of Rosie, the protagonist, as a skater. I skated, but I wasn’t as good as the boys in the film who are really great skateboarders. And I think that was the idea of just wanting to fit into these people that you don’t necessarily fit in with, but really at that age, you want to appeal to certain groups of people. I was based off of the universal experience that we have of that feeling at that age and then also what if I was like that cool girl who did fit in with them? What would happen if I actually hung out with them?

So you were shooting post COVID then or during—I mean, if we even are post COVID—But you were shooting largely after the lockdowns when the streets were opened a little bit, and you still had safety procedures for your cast and crew?

Actually, I went back in my notes recently for another piece, a local article about the New York City aspects, and I had to look back. When did I write my first note? When was my first idea? And I remember I was walking around, I wrote it actually April 2020, literally a month after lockdown. But then I didn’t start writing the script until 2021, which was kind of vaccines and lockdown being lifted. And then we didn’t shoot until 2022. We had a SAG film and they had strict protocol back then.

And that’s why like in all our behind the scenes photos, like we all have masks on and it was we had like a COVID compliance officer still at that point, there that was still a requirement for shooting. So we did have COVID like department and like testing and all of the protocol that they do for union production. So I was like people still going back to work at that time, but it was still like COVID department protocol and stuff.

And you also have a highly specific look to the film. It’s shot in a narrower aspect ratio than most viewers are used to these days. The color grading seems like highly specific to me to want to kind of evoke memories. Could you talk a little bit about those elements of the process? I think they’re very integral to making your film seem very much like a felt memory.

Thank you for saying that. I feel like I’m glad that it felt like a memory because I feel like that’s exactly the feeling of it that we’re trying to go for. I worked very closely with my cinematographer, Michael Cong. And I think originally we shot actually in regular 16:9 ratio for the digital portions because that’s just how the camera the aspect ratio is for when you are filming, which is good because it allowed us in post with my editor Hailey to a letterbox, close in on the 4:3 ratio that we did set and save ourselves in certain shots to basically allow us to reposition the center of the shot in the edit for the 4:3 ratio.

That was definitely purposeful originally, I had always gone into it like wanting 4:3, even though I knew we had to shoot wider. Because I think because of growing up as a millennial, when the TVs were full screen or whatever, that was just that was the norm, and I think that was trying to relate to what we were all used to. You know, seeing and it helps hone in on this idea of a narrow like a memory or what you’re saying, like it’s like closing in something. I don’t know. It’s like very subliminal. Like it feels like when it’s wider. I still like scope films, but it does give this idea of it being in someone’s mind or something, and I think that was what I want, especially with the Super-8 stuff and the color too.

We worked with the colorist from Company 3, and we were specific where the digital footage had to be warm. Then the super eight stuff was cold so that there was a difference that you can tell the difference between the two, but having it still a very stylized look.

And another key element of the production of course is your cast, who was excellent throughout. You mentioned that it’s a SAG film. Can you talk a little bit about casting the film? And in particular, your protagonist, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, who’s really wonderful? 

Absolutely. Yeah, Malea is so talented. She’s amazing. And yes, she’s SAG And she it was interesting trying to find the protagonist because it’s such a specific character, and we went through a lot of methods to cast our protagonists. Initially, we did a lot of backstage and online casting calls and we had a lot of local actors audition. But it was tricky with the age range. She’s supposed to be a pre teen and a lot of people that we got were a little older. They were maybe a teenager, they were like 15 or 16.

And I was I was realizing it’s harder to portray the script, the story idea, If they’re too old, it feels like the stakes are not high enough for them to me. I wanted it to be preteen specifically just because that’s really her character was like when she’s really confronting these feelings for the first time. And when you’re older, you kind of already have gone through those feelings. So actually, I saw her in a film I went to see that summer called After Yang. And I said, well, I saw this movie, and she was really good. And I don’t know if she’s like the right age because she was very young in it, but maybe she’s older now. And they reached out to her team on IMDB Pro, actually.

Then they sent her the script and she auditioned and she actually wrote the song that plays at the end of the movie and played it on ukulele in her audition tape! So it was like no one else did that, and I was like, really blown away by, how talented she was. And then she wrote, like this whole song that was like the whole idea of the film. She understood the character completely. And that was like how we cast her.

That is awesome. How could you not give her the job! But the song is lovely. And I know she is talented as an actor and as a vocalist as well. But I was going to compliment you on that song and just ask where it came from, and now I know the answer to that!

It’s kind of a crazy story!

So you’re making a short film. And it was a year ago, two years ago, you were one of the recipients of the Latino Lens narrative short film incubator grant. That helped with this particular film, is that right? Could I just have you talk a little bit about the assistance that a grant like that kind of gives you in terms of your freedom as a filmmaker?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that’s the reason why the timeline of when we made the film happened. So I had wrote the film like I was saying in 2021, like, I finished the script, but we were submitting that script I finished in 2021 to grants for about a year—a lot of different grants. And then it wasn’t until 2022 that like a year later, we got this grant, and it was just so amazing.

So the reason why the whole film was able to be made was really because of, like this amazing grant from NALIP and Netflix. And they gave us a lot of money to make it, and they gave us a camera package and mentorship. So this was my first film as a solo director, my first official project out of not being in school or anything, like, being a professional filmmaker. So this was perfect for me as having a mentorship, having  the funds available. I really commend people who do crowd funding. I think that’s great, and especially people who get funded. I’m always so amazed and happy for them. For me, I just don’t I don’t want to do crowd funding for myself. So I’ll put in all the work to write essays and go on interviews for grants. I commend the crowd funding people, but I am very happy and grateful that we got this amazing grant that helped us dream bigger for this project basically was what it did.

Congratulations to you for it. And I think a lot of people don’t always realize just how much work is involved—whatever path one takes to raise funds for filmmaking. It’s always a challenge, and it always requires a lot of work from a person who may be coming at that really just with a simple intention of just wanting to write and direct. But to get off the ground, you’ve got to, like you’ve done here, produce, and that often means fund raising for the project as well. So: where and when in the future, besides the Woodstock Film Festival, can people look forward to seeing Sunflower Girl?

It’s really been a crazy month. This month is that happens to be the most festivals that we’ve ever had for the past year. I think it’s over ten honestly this month, it’s going to be at Woodstock on Friday and then it’s going to be in New York City again at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival in Brooklyn. Then I’m actually going to Germany because it’s going to be at the Hof International Film Festival. I did. And then yeah, it’s going to be a line. So if you’re not going to be in Germany or New York for Americans only from the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific FilmFest until 27 October, so it’ll be available to stream.

Okay, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us, Holly. I greatly enjoyed your film. I’m looking forward to all of our viewers and readers getting to watch it in the future and Bon voyage for your international travels, and good luck with your New York Woodstock Film Festival this week.

Thank you. thanks so much.