Denver Film Festival Premieres Emilie Upczak’s human trafficking drama ‘Moving Parts’
Denver native Emilie Upczak moved to Trinidad and Tobago and became Creative Director of the Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival where she worked for ten years. At that time, she not only helped set up the only Caribbean Film Industry Center but began making a fiction feature film about human trafficking.
She enlisted the prize winning DP Nancy Schreiberwho also recently shot Ondi Timoner’s Robert Mapplethorpe biopic Mapplethorpe who was recently honored at the High Falls Film Festival, an annual event celebrating female filmmakers with the Susan B. Anthony “Failure is Impossible” Award “in recognition of her contributions to the art of filmmaking as one of the few female cinematographers working today.”
Moving Parts is about an illegal Chinese immigrant who, after being smuggled into Trinidad and Tobago to be with her brother, discovers the true cost of her arrival.
Emilie Upczak’s films reflect her interest in ritual practice and in sexual identity; interests that were first sparked after she spent two-years travelling throughout Southeast Asia when she was 19, where she encountered numerous religious traditions and worked as an escort in a hostess club in Tokyo. Her experiences have helped to shape a body of work that reflect groups or practices that are considered non-normative; her films aim to challenge and humanize those on the outskirts.
She has made a number of short documentaries that have played at international film festivals and created a series of experimental work where she explored bodies in action, bodies of color and the female gaze. Following this, she departed into the narrative form and directed the short film Knockabout, distributed by Anansi Studios.
Emilie has an MFA in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts; she is a Rotterdam Producers Lab alumni and a part of the EAVE Producers network.
Moving Parts is her maiden feature.
Producers:
John Otterbacher is based in Chicago where he splits his time between teaching and filmmaking. Otterbacher has mainly worked as a producer and cinematographer specializing in independent film/tv/new media and work for nonprofit organizations. As a college instructor, Otterbacher has taught at a number of institutions and is currently coordinator for the Cinematography program at Tribeca Flashpoint College in Chicago. He is a board member of IFP Chicago and is a member of the Education Advisory Committee for Cinema/Chicago. More recently, John received his MFA in film from VCFA where he met Emilie.
Officially Limited and Father Burke’s Boss Battle are John’s most recent film projects. John’s Orange Chair production company supervised post production on Moving Parts, his fourth narrative feature.
Rhonda Chan Soo is a Trinidadian filmmaker who returned to home to develop a body of work dealing with contemporary issues of Caribbean identity. She has focused on films surrounding social issues, the environment and culture. Rhonda received a Master of Arts degree in documentary filmmaking from the Documentary Film Program at Wake Forest University, where she co-directed, co-produced and served as principal editor on Unconditional, a short human rights documentary that has screened at number of festivals in the United States. She was selected as a fellow with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Birmingham, Alabama in 2013.
Upon returning home, she directed Riding Bull Cart which won best local documentary short at the trinidad + tobago film festival, and also Quiet Revolution, which won the jury award at Green Screen, the Environmental Film Festival in Trinidad. She is currently developing an environmental micro-documentary series, and also a series on mental health.
DP:
Nancy Schreiber, ASC is an award-winning cinematographer based in both New York and Los Angeles. She was the fourth woman ever voted into membership into the prestigious American Society of Cinematographers. She was recently the recipient of the ASC President’s Award, the first woman in the 98 year history of the organization.
Schreiber was honored with the Best Dramatic Cinematography Award at Sundance for the film November. She also shared the Best Cinematography Award at Sundance for My America…Or Honk If You Love Buddha, and she garnered an Emmy nomination for Best Cinematography on the acclaimed Celluloid Closet for HBO. Well regarded in the industry, Schreiber was chosen as director of photography for Visions of Light, a stunning documentary on the art of cinematography, an early high definition film directed by top film critic, Todd McCarthy. Schreiber has filmed countless features, including Folk Hero & Funny Guy, directed by Jeff Grace, which premiered in competition at Tribeca, 2016, and is currently in theatrical release Other films include Fugly!, directed by Alfredo De Villa, written and starring John Leguizamo with Rosie Perez and Griffin Dunne, and It’s a Disaster, with America Ferrera, Julia Stiles, Jeff Grace and David Cross. Schreiber was also the director of photography on Neil La Bute’s Your Friends and Neighbors. She recently wrapped production on Mapplethorpe, the new narrative feature by Ondi Timoner.
Valerie Tian is a Canadian actress, best known for her role as Su-Chin in Juno and Burns in 21 Jump Street. She first auditioned for Canadian director Mina Shum in the summer of 2001, while Shum was casting for Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity, and won the leading role of Mindy Ho. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002, and was shown at the Sundance Film Festival and LA Asian American Film Festival in 2003. In 2004, she played alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme in the action movie Wake of Death.
She also had a cameo appearance in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and leading roles in the Wake of Death and in the short film,Chika’s Bird. She appeared as an X kid in X2 and X-Men United, and as an elf in Disney’s Santa Clause 2.
Valerie was a series regular on the Warner Brothers’ television series, ‘Black Sash’, appeared in a cameo role in the ABC series ‘The Days’ and had a guest starring role in the first season of ‘Arrow’, she was also a series regular on the CTV series, ‘Motive’. She has appeared in a number of feature films including ‘Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer’, ‘Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief’ and recently play a part in ‘A.C.O.D.’ and in ‘Words and Pictures’ with Juliette Binoche and Clive Owen and portrayed Morgan.
Interview with director, Emilie Upczak
What’s the film about?
‘Moving Parts’ is the story of Zhenzhen, a young woman who leaves China after the death of her father to be with her brother, a construction worker on the twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Her expectations are shattered upon arrival, when an arbitrary debt is placed on her for entering the country and she must find the way or means to pay it.
‘Moving Parts’ is a story of choices and the point in a woman’s life when she chooses to do the unthinkable to save herself and pursue a better life. The film is not a typical story of a northern, white male protagonist saving his black, brown and yellow victims but rather a quiet observation of one woman and her process in a less than hopeful situation.
How do you feel about the film? Did it come out the way you wanted it to?
I feel really proud of what we have done. Making an independent narrative feature film is a long journey, this one has taken five years to complete. Film is also such a collaborative process and there are so many points along the way where one can lose track of the tone and vision for the film. I have had an awesome group of serious and creatively minded people on this project, from the cast, crew and executive producers in Trinidad, to our Puerto Rican colleagues and the Chicago, Providence and New York-based post-production team.
The movie has taken shape in a way I feel very excited about, from the storytelling to the acting to the cinematography and score. I’m also proud to be telling a story about life experiences that are not commonly represented: that of immigrants, the disenfranchised, the desperate, or another way to view them: the strong.
What are your hopes for the film?
We premiered in competition at Denver Film Festival, Friday November 3. It’s their 40th anniversary and I really respect their festival and programming team. After that are our Caribbean and European festival premieres and then work on a Caribbean theatrical release as I feel committed that content developed and produced in the region should return to audiences there.
What kind of research did you conduct to make the characters and stories feel true to life?
I studied under Dr. Kamala Kempadoo at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She edited an anthology entitled Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. This text was an early inquiry for me into the topic of sex work and discussed at length the changing demographics of sex workers and their clientele. When in Trinidad, I did research at the Gender and Development Institute at the University of the West Indies and I also informally interviewed women working in the sex industry as well as women in domestic servitude. I did field work and went to a number of brothels on the island, spoke with people I knew to gauge attitudes and stories about prostitution and I looked through printed publications and online sites that advertised sex for sale. Our team also was given profiles by the Counter Trafficking Unit and we received anecdotal and factual information from a non profit CURB, which works to curtail sex trafficking in the Caribbean.
What are the film’s sources of inspiration?
I first came in contact with the sex industry when I was twenty, living in Tokyo. I worked in a hostess club entertaining Japanese businessmen and their clients. Later I put myself through college working as a waitress in a sushi restaurant in Colorado. Many of the film’s concepts and characters come from those experiences.
Additionally, I spent ten formative years in my thirties living in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago [T&T]. I often frequented a Chinese restaurant in the city. A friend gave me an article from one of the local newspapers that told the story of a Venezuelan woman who had been brought over a number of times to the island as a sex worker. The article depicted her as a criminal without a moral compass and did not attempt to dissect the larger system/s in place that facilitate human smuggling onto the island and the selling of foreign bodies to Trinidadian nationals for a number of differentpurposes. I began to notice the Chinese restaurant I frequented stayed open much later than other places and had a steady stream of customers not dining in the restaurant but going upstairs for sexual services. I remember one evening, having dinner, watching our waitress and asking myself: Who is she? Where did she come from? It was at this moment that the concept for ‘Moving Parts’ was born.
Why did you move to Trinidad in the first place and what else did you do there?
I moved to T&T in 2006. My husband was born there to American parents in the 1960s and subsequently our son was also born there. We intended to be on the island for a year, but one year turned into ten. At the time, the government’s identification of film as one of seven industries to develop outside of the economic mainstay of natural gas and oil caused the film industry to become more formalized. I applied for and received a grant from the film commission, FilmTT, for my first documentary project, dancing deities and met the two monitors for the project who were starting a film festival. I joined their team and ended up working with the organization, the trinidad+tobago film festival, as the creative director.
Subsequently, ‘Moving Parts’ was one of three films selected by the film commission to receive feature film funds. This film would not exist without their financial and professional support.
How did you find your talent?
Valerie Tian and Kandyse McClure, Canadian actresses based in Vancouver, came to the project through the T&T filmmaker Oliver Milne who knew them from film school. Valerie has played in a number of well-known films including Juno and 21 Jumpstreet. Kandyse is best known for her role as Officer Anastasia Dualla on the television series Battlestar Galactica and is now a series regular on Ghost Wars. We also worked with Trinidadian actress Jacqueline Chan whose credits include the 1963 film Cleopatra and Netflix’s more recent Marco Polo series. For the rest of the cast, we utilized both local actors and non-actors, Trinidad is an ethnically diverse place made up of people from the African and East Indian diaspora as well as Syrian, Lebanese, Chinese, European and the North American. The film reflects this diversity in its production team, casting, and storytelling.
Why did you choose to work with a female cinematographer?
Nancy Schreiber, ASC was recommended to me by a number of producers and filmmakers in the industry. She has a great reputation and is committed to independent film. I had done my own camera work in some of my previous films and I wanted to explore the female gaze.
The story is told from the female protagonist’s perspective and as a female writer/director, I wanted the images authored by a woman as well. It’s really been an experiment with the female gaze, in terms of framing, camera position, lighting, I found some of the more intensely intimate scenes came off well with Nancy behind the camera. We just finished color correction at Technicolor PostWorks in New York and Nancy’s input was invaluable.
She is a wealth of knowledge. She was the fourth woman to join the American Society of Cinematographers, and she won the President’s Award earlier this year. It’s not often one gets to work with someone as generous in spirit.
How long did it take to write and develop the project?
The first draft of the script was complete in May 2013. Soon afterward I was accepted into a low-residency Master of Fine Arts program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I developed the script there under the guidance of some of the most interesting American independent filmmakers working today including Laura Colella, Julia Solomonoff, Terence Nance, T Marie Dudman, So Yong Kim, and Brandon Cole. I also met my producer John Otterbacher and composer Rafael Attias at VCFA. After that I spent another year in pre-production, casting and finding the right locations. Having lived in Trinidad for a number of years, I was able to find places and spaces that were perfect for the story, with the help of my production designer Shannon Alonzo and members of our art team Josh Lu and Melanie Archer.
What is your next project?
It’s a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the 1970s in Southern California, about one summer when a teenage girl learns about herself and discovers where she came from.
Directed by: Emilie Upczak
Written by: Emilie Upczak, Nicholas Emery, Jay White
Produced by: John Otterbacher, Emilie Upczak
Co-Producers: Rhonda Chan Soo, Annabelle Mullen
Executive Producers: Melanie Archer, Bonnie Kennedy, Jud Valeski
Cinematographer: Nancy Schreiber
Production Designer: Shannon Alonzo
Editing: Gabriel Coss, Jonathan Gollner
Production Sound: Cedric Smart
Sound Design: Kris Franzen
Score: Rafael Attias
Trinidad and Tobago / United States 2017, 77 minutes
In English and Mandarin with English Subtitles
Sound Mix 5.1 / Aspect Ratio 2.4:1 / DCP, Blu Ray
Shot on location in Trinidad and Tobago
Grants
FilmTT | United Nations Trinidad and Tobago | British High Commission|
Counter Trafficking Unit | NLCB
