Reya’s World is dark. It’s blue and fuzzy and crackly, with piles of dishes and flickering screens and small moments of hope—followed by the fear that you’ll lose motivation again. This film has the look, sound, and feel of cyclical major depression, and the way an audience will react to it depends on their reaction to that.
However, I will let the young director Isabella Montana speak about this film in her own words with Mental Filmness’s assistant extraordinaire Beatrice Wong, in an appropriately analog written interview:
“I had a Zoom interview with the director Izzy Montana where we talked about her film Reya’s World, which is a pretty subversive DIY short film about a girl, Reya, stuck inside her bedroom while struggling during a cycle of depression. With unconventional shot selections (there are only a handful of wide shots), and sound design choices (more on that later) Izzy is able to conjure up an atmospheric trip that started with a bleak canvass of greyish desaturated colours that reflected how Reya perceived her current life.
The colours gradually came back slightly when unplanned happenstances come across her, e.g. a friend swings by to hang out and instead of giving her a list of advice, just chose to be present and had random banter or just fuss about with art supplies (which is a scene ripped from real life experiences of her or her peers). When I asked Izzy what her background was, I was expecting film school, being a crew member of a small production company, etc. but instead Izzy’s film education is more on the academic side of things like film theory and analysis. And that even though she was also the cinematographer, editor, did the colour grading as well, all this technical stuff wasn’t part of her studies and she was learning them herself on the fly.
This is a pretty impressive feat and not something that she wanted to repeat but at the time of filming, she was too shy to reach out for help, or her circle of friends didn’t intersect with film school training and one funny tidbit was the boom operator doesn’t know what a boom is when he offered to help. So my next question naturally became, where did she find the drive to undertake this endeavour, was it a therapeutic thing that she had to do to help herself – Well it started life as a thesis project, and since depression was something she experienced and currently something one of her close friends was struggling with, it was the go-to theme for the script, and it was the scriptwriting process that was the most therapeutic part for her, because she was basically shooting the film in her bedroom, planning the shoots for the next day before bed then catching some Zzzzs whilst having all the film equipment next to her bed. She was forced to compartmentalize and get emotionally detached from the script, and it was during the post production process that she was able to find some sort of catharsis.
Pretty par for the course in DIY filmmaking about personal topics. As for the script, one may say that it doesn’t adhere to the 3-Act structure rule and grade it D minus, but that is of Izzy’s design, as she is very aware that mental health isn’t exactly a movie – a problem arises, then the protagonist fight their way through the problem, the problem gets resolved – so for this film, she chose to give the film something akin to a cliffhanger ending, it hints at Reya seeming to look forward to a less bleak tomorrow, but at the same time also doesn’t hint at she is able to be motivated enough to leave her safe space, her bedroom. There is no obvious resolution, which I thought is a great choice when making a film about mental health.
We also spoke at length about the audio choices, while all other filmmakers strive to put maximum effort in getting the cleanest sounding dialogues and sound environments, or laboriously fine tuning noise reduction settings, Izzy chose to think differently, because she wants to invite the audience to also experience what Reya hears – the world is blanketed out by a mix of hissing, white noise, a droning tone that won’t go away, sincere words of advice from a friend that sounds like it’s coming from deep underwater, the only thing of interest to her is when someone recognizes her and calls out her name, and the only moment where the audio briefly becomes “normal” sounding. Izzy wants to let the audience hear through Reya’s ears, when they are already seeing through her eyes.
Izzy is humble and kept mentioning she felt it was underlit, or improperly colour corrected, but for me it is what makes the film work so well, I felt there is a lived-in quality about the film, and hearing about Izzy actually living inside her set, being self-taught and shooting the film intuitively rather than according to conventions laid down by a committee of tutors, I understand why. Though this is only her second short film ever, she really managed to wrangle a very balanced performance from her young actors – naturalistic, laid-back but engaging, and a way she achieved this is by allowing the actors to express the gist of the lines written in the script rather than reciting it word-by-word. Izzy didn’t aim to transmit a carefully constructed message, but rather wanted to create an intimate journey that resonates with audiences who have or are going through similar mental health struggles and maybe inspire them to look back at their experiences under a different light.
My last question to her was why the 4:3 aspect ratio when most films or cameras are by default 16:9 now, and the answer is simpler than one might think, this is just because of how the bedroom was like, a 4:3 rectangle of space, and Izzy also found this aspect ratio is better at conveying how claustrophobic Reya felt about the world she is in, and it certainly works better this way than resorting to the default of 16:9, and hence the conscious choice not to film wide shots. To be honest I was a little blown away by the responses, and Izzy sounded more like a veteran filmmaker rather than someone who is just doing coursework, there’s a lot of detail in the creative processes that are well thought out and leaving very little to chance. Wishing a bright future for her.”
– Beatrice Wong for Mental Filmness
You can watch Reya’s World in Shorts Block No. 5 in the virtual festival for FREE from now until 11/3: https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/6704b2b8dd02d60047462b6c/66f395d62daf120081a1b988
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