The House My Mother Left is a short film that recently wrapped production. It follows a mother and daughter, both still grieving the loss of the family patriarch, as they sift through what’s left of their recently ransacked home.
Writer/director Kaylin Allshouse used the film as an opportunity to explore conflicting feelings left between her mother and herself after her own father died in 2017.
“You might think about, oh, it’s going to be really hard to lose a parent. That’s the loss that I’m going to be grieving,” Allshouse says.
But what she found was that she and her mother were grieving a different kind of loss.
“Our family unit was now disrupted,” she says. “When my dad passed away, I found that my mom and I had a really hard time. We’re very similar. But because of that, it makes it hard to move past arguments or to resolve things just because we have a lot of the same tactics of how we want something to be resolved. And with my dad, it was always him being the peacemaker. But without him, there it was. Not only are we grieving for his loss, but now we also had to figure out how we were going to communicate without him.”
Allshouse strove for authenticity in making the film, which led her in two directions. The first was in casting mother and daughter Eve and Alexandra Bianco in the lead roles.
“We were really lucky in that fact,” she says. “I had met Ali several years ago. She went to Kenyon College and was a freshman when I was a senior. I’ve just always been really impressed with her acting. I thought that she would be a really great fit to not only represent me well, but make the character her own. We were really lucky that her mother is also an actress and we were able to bring her on, too.”
The second choice Allshouse made to capture the realism she was looking for was her decision to shoot on 16-millimeter film.
How challenging was that?
“Massively challenging,” says Allshouse’s cinematographer, Sydney Lawson. “When Kaylin first approached me, I was like, ‘Find somebody else.’ She believed in me. And I’m really glad that she did.”
Shooting digitally means that you can immediately play back what you just filmed and see how it looked, then scrap it and go again if you don’t like what you see. And, to a degree, you are otherwise free to shoot a scene as many times as you want.
With film, there’s no playback and your number of takes is limited by the quantity of expensive 16mm film you have to burn.
“Kaylin knows what she wants, and she rehearses a lot,” says Lawson. “I think that because you’re shooting on film, everything is a bit more streamlined. Everyone is a bit more focused as filmmakers collaborating on a set together. It’s almost this special experience where you have to be a little bit more on top of things than you are with digital. But because of that, the product and the energy is better overall because people are more focused.”
“Shooting on film is just really getting back to the basics of everything,” Allshouse says. “It’s getting back to the basics in storyboarding and storytelling, but also in lighting and composition and just having to be really intentional with your shots.”
Allshouse also shot her previous short, PARTNR, on film.
“I think that film makes me a better director,” she says. “I think that it makes me much more intentional in the way that I look at things and the way that I shoot things because it is so precious. We had five rolls of film and once we shot those, we were done. So, it just made me really think, what is the story I’m trying to tell and what shots do I absolutely need to make this story come to life?”
But what purpose does the use of film serve?
“It goes back into the aesthetic of the film itself,” Allshouse says. “It’s shot in a house that is from the ’50s, so it already has incredible production design built into it. When you have things like production design and costumes and makeup and lighting working together for this vintage aesthetic, it’s just an obvious choice to me to also incorporate the medium that you’re shooting on to be a part of that as well.”
The House My Mother Left also boasted a crew composed mainly of Columbus filmmakers. Half of those filmmakers were women, all under the age of 30.
“There’s incredible talent coming out of the Columbus film community, but it’s also incredibly young,” Lawson says. “We’ve all been really fortunate to have great mentors and great projects that we’ve gotten to work on and it just shows in the film community.”
Allshouse agrees.
“Columbus is just going to get insane here in a second,” she says.
Additional Reading: Learn more about how film could be Columbus’ next big industry, and legislation that could impact the industry across the state.
