Each year, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival hosts panels dedicated to directors for an audience of Savannah College of Art and Design (that’s SCAD) students. This year’s Behind Their Lens: Directors panel, in partnership with IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking, hosted women and nonbinary filmmakers: Mary Bronstein (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), Leslye Headland (“The Acolyte,” “Russian Doll”), HIKARI (“Rental Family”), and Eva Victor (“Sorry, Baby”).
The four filmmakers sat down with IndieWire Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio (that’s me) on Tuesday, October 28, in Savannah for a wide-ranging discussion about their new and upcoming projects, and past challenges and triumphs. All four are independent filmmakers who’ve crafted deeply personal work with the support of well-resourced financing, production, and distribution companies and studios, whether A24 (which picked up “Sorry, Baby” out of Sundance 2025 and produced and distributed “If I Had Legs”), Disney (“The Acolyte”), Netflix (“Russian Doll”), or Searchlight Pictures (“Rental Family”).
“I find that it’s a process of digging the deepest that you can possibly dig, and then taking that really specific thing and figuring out a way to abstract it out so that it’s something that people can also find themselves in,” said Bronstein, who took “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” to other companies, where she was rejected, until A24 fully trusted in her vision.
For Headland, pivoting from plays and films like “Bachelorette” and Netflix’s time-hopping dark comedy “Russian Doll” to the “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte” involved retaining the personal by laundering her film nerdiness into broader franchise IP vernacular.
“There’s a lot of me in the movies I make and projects I do,” said Japanese director HIKARI of her film, which stars Brendan Fraser as a man hired to play surrogate relatives or friends for grieving people in Tokyo. “Slicing my own experience into the story. This one [‘Rental Family’] quite a bit. [It was] therapeutic, maybe.” Working with Searchlight Pictures allowed her to broaden her scope. “My first movie was [made for] less than a million. I basically called everybody, including my rich ex-boyfriend, to see if he could give me money.”
Before “Sorry, Baby,” Victor cut their teeth with self-made social media videos about their anxiety, and was also a writer for the satirical women’s self-help website Reductress. “Sorry, Baby” was produced by Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski through their production company Pastel. “Their intervention level is very, very deliberate. The messaging was always ‘you need to make the film you want to make,’ and that is the thing that allowed me to make the film I wanted to make. They got out of the way and were very protective of me discovering as I went.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.