In this episode of Film Formally, we chat with Toronto-based filmmaker (and one of our favourite collaborators) Sophy Romvari about why she scales down her films’ budgets, crew sizes, and production length. Together, we talk critically about the widespread perception that a film’s quality is defined by its “production value”, the complexity of its shoot, and the pain endured in making it.
Sophy aims to make films where everyone is happy to be on set and contributing meaningfully to the result, as well as close-knit environments that allow for emotional intimacy and creative spontaneity. Her films, many of which are hybrid documentaries, are raw and vulnerable portraits filmed rigorously executed formal conceits, have seen widespread festival success and been shown on CBC Short Docs.
In this episode, we discuss:
How personally tailored production models can be constructed from the ground up.
Why Hollywood-style filmmaking is seen as the default for independent filmmakers.
The tradeoffs that come with shrinking or expanding your crew and schedule.
The assumptions and biases that people bring to small-scale cinema.
What an increased budget can and can’t bring to such a small production.
Additional resources:
You can watch some of Sophy’s films we have collaborated on, including her halloween themed hybrid-documentary Pumpkin Movie about creepy encounters with men and the pervasive nature of gender inequality, her documentary In Dog Years about the connection between humans and their beloved aging dogs, and her narrative short Nine Behind about a cultural and generational gap between a young woman and her grandfather.
Sophy Romvari’s hybrid documentary Pumpkin Movie.
Sophy Romvari’s documentary film In Dog Years.
Sophy Romvari’s Nine Behind.
Finally, Romvari wrote an article about place, mental health and priorities as an independent filmmaker for Filmmaker Magazine. You can read the article here.
Sophy Romvari
Sophy Romvari is a filmmaker born in Victoria, B.C. and based in Toronto. Her critically-acclaimed short films have travelled the international festival circuit and have earned her a reputation as a leading young talent. Her filmmaking is mostly autoethnographic with a focus on processing trauma, either personally or collectively. She is playful in her approach to documentary as a form, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
Her hybrid documentary Pumpkin Movie premiered at True/False festival in St. Louis to considerable praise, before bowing at Hot Docs and Sheffield Doc Fest, among many others. It toured cinemas across the United States as part of the Eyeslicer Halloween Special in October 2018. Pumpkin Movie has been praised by critics as "a lovely, subtle work of feminist protest."
In 2018 her short Norman Norman received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where critics described it as “a rich, fully developed narrative, bridging the gulf between denial and acceptance in a mere seven minutes.” The film was the centerpiece of “Super Succinct and Radically Direct,” a retrospective of Sophy’s work at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, and was selected as the best short film of the year by rogerebert.com critic Justine Smith.
Sophy recently completed her Masters at York University during which she shot her most recent short film, Still Processing.