A conversation with filmmaker Sontenish Myers

The Caribbean-American filmmaker discusses how her immigrant identity in America has shaped her creative work.

Written by Alexandra Harris

Sontenish Myers is a Caribbean-American filmmaker whose work grapples with racial identity, womanhood, power dynamics, and the heroic journey.  Her most recent short film, Cross My Heart, tells the story of an American teenager girl who visits her family in Jamaica and discovers a secret that changes the way she sees the people she loves. She then faces the decision of staying silent or speaking up, with unfoldings to whichever her choice is. It premiered at the East End Film Festival in London and made its North American debut at the Seattle International Film Festival.

The short has since garnered multiple awards, earning Sontenish the Alexis Award for Best Emerging Student Filmmaker at the Palm Springs International Shortfest and winning Vimeo’s Staff Pick Award at the Hampton International Film Festival.

I met up with Sontenish at a cafe on the Upper West Side, in New York City, before the showing of her film at Barnard College’s 2019 Athena Film Festival. We chatted about her creative inspirations, upcoming projects, the importance of building a community and, of course, identity. “I’m still discovering how being Caribbean-American has shaped my perspective. If you come from an immigrant family, there’s some things that you don’t 100 percent identify with here, and some things that you don’t 100 percent identify with abroad. That’s why telling immigrant stories is so important: It creates that bridge for people”, she says.

 

What was your main source of inspiration for making Cross My Heart? Was it at all inspired by the #MeToo movement and our current political moment?

I wrote the film in the summer of 2016, so obviously the #MeToo movement had already existed, but it hadn’t yet caught fire in the way it did in the fall of 2017. So, I wrote it at a time when I myself was feeling so filled to the brim with secrets and I had my own version of this story. The story of the film was quite fictional, but those I would confide in about my own experience had their own version. And the next person I would talk to had their own version. And so on. It’s just like Tarana Burke [the civil rights activist from The Bronx, New York, who founded the #MeToo movement] said: you’re either a survivor or you know one. So I wrote it because I couldn’t think about anything else. I was just completely consumed by how my world got rocked by it. I confided in another friend that I was making the film — I didn’t even tell her what had happened in my life — and then she told me her story, and I was like: Okay, obviously I need to make this. So I hit the ground running and worked with incredible collaborators. The film was all written, directed, shot, edited, produced, and sound recorded by women.

 

Did you specifically choose teenage girls because you wanted it to be younger voices addressing this issue?

Honestly, I think it was just intuitive for me. I think the coming-of-age genre is probably the most saturated genre in short films. But it’s not very diverse. I think that ironically, for something so saturated, there’s actually so much more room for inclusive portrayals.

But I did really want to have this beautiful love and intimacy and sisterly relationship between these two girls and how their relationship is challenged by what happens in the film. The question I’m asking in the film is: What do you do when someone you love hurts someone you love? For the protagonist, determining the right thing to do is maddening. Because there are also no models for how to deal with these situations. Especially when they happen in your family. We’re seeing some professional models — kind of — through great trial and error, but within your family: What models are there really?

 

Who are your biggest artistic role models?

I will say I’m still finding them. Lynne Ramsay was one of the first filmmakers where I really saw a visual language that I really identified with. I was so blown away by her work and especially her earlier short films, like Holy Cow. Darnell Martin with her film Their Eyes Were Watching God. It had such an effect on me — it was the first carefree black girl I’d ever seen on screen, and it was the first time on screen that I had seen a black girl laying on her back in a body of water. As a Jamaican-American girl, I had lived that a thousand times, but I had never seen it on screen. And I think that gave me a lot of permission when I was making Cross My Heart.

If you come from an immigrant family, there’s some things that you don’t 100 percent identify with here, and some things that you don’t 100 percent identify with abroad. That’s why telling immigrant stories is so important: It creates that bridge for people.

 

What led you to the subjects you work on, including womanhood, racial identity, and power dynamics?

I think the feeling of powerlessness is what moved me to become a filmmaker in the first place. When I decided to become a filmmaker, I was living in China and I was watching the trial against George Zimmerman, who shot the African-American unarmed student Trayvon Martin. When the verdict was announced as not guilty, I was just washed over with this feeling of invisibility and I just felt like our humanity is still not seen in this country. Which was of no surprise, but it’s the fact of the matter. At the time I was critiquing a lot of media and studying media representation, but in that moment I was just like: I don’t want to critique media anymore — I want to be a part of making it.

When you’re unpacking your powerlessness, you’re as a result exploring power and power dynamics. With Cross My Heart, I just really wanted to show the thickness of a tension in a power dynamic with no words. I think that American audiences are really conditioned to see Black people speaking all the time, especially Black women. You have to be funny, you’re the joke-maker, or the butt of a joke. And while I enjoy content where we’re so actionable, I wanted to contribute  by making a film where we’re being silent, we’re wrestling with something, we’re thinking on screen. It was something Moonlight did beautifully, and that was so quietly radical: You were really just seeing Black men thinking on screen.

 

How was growing up between worlds and cultures? How does your upbringing influence you as a storyteller and filmmaker?

I’m still discovering how being Caribbean-American has shaped my perspective. I’ve been travelling back and forth to Jamaica since I was old enough to be on a plane. I think I always had a global perspective that was very normal to me. My parents had me when they were in college, so I was really in touch with their upbringing. I saw how my great-grandmother lived in St. Elizabeth, in Jamaica, and all of those things leave an impression on you. If you come from an immigrant family, there’s some things that you don’t 100 percent identify with here, and some things that you don’t 100 percent identify with abroad. That’s why telling immigrant stories is so important: It creates that bridge for people.

There are so many memories that you have as a child of an immigrant that you may or may not realize are so different from other people’s in America. Knowing that my grandmother lived in Jamaica and then lived in England in the 70s, and knowing what Caribbean Americans experienced during that time in that country. Or moving with my dad and his siblings to the Bronx… I really encourage immigrant families and children of immigrants to pay attention to their memories and to the lives and experiences that their elders had carried. Some things are challenging about it, but some things are also so delightfully interesting and beautiful about being an immigrant or being the child of an immigrant in this city.

 

Where/what do you consider “home?”

It’s definitely both. I refer to Jamaica as home and I refer to New York as home. My dad’s Jamaican and my mom’s American, so I very much identify also with being a Black person in America with ancestors who were enslaved here. I feel deeply connected to both. And I’m grateful that I have both to bounce between — sometimes one gives relief to the other.

 

What is next for you? Do you have any projects in a near future?

I just recently directed my first music video. The song is “BGM” by Temi Oni, who is a fantastic emerging indie artist. It’s a really cool concept. It has an opening narrative scene, but it’s drama intersecting with science fiction, which is a genre that I want to explore in my next work.

Right now I’m writing my first feature, Stampede, which is a science fiction feature. It’s still similar to Cross My Heart in that it deals with the inner lives of women and power dynamics, but I think it’s kind of taking that to the next level. I’m really interested in heroic journeys right now. I’m kind of mining my interests and gravitating towards the voids that I feel in the form and trying to tell stories that are exciting to me and really elevate our visibility in heroism — be that in a striking, triumphant way or in a more subtle, ordinary way, like in Cross My Heart.

One of my 2019 intentions is to create more impulsively and compulsively. Don’t think: It isn’t the right time. No, do it while the thrill is in you, while that buzz is in your chest. I also read a study recently that said that, for women of color’s mental health, it’s really important and helpful to spend quality time with other women of color twice a week. So lately I’ve been trying to meet that quota each week, and I’m finding it not only helpful for my heart and my mind, but also creatively.  

 

What piece of advice do you give for young women trying to establish their voice as creators?

I think there is so much clarity in just paying attention to what you like — trusting what you like and being okay with what you don’t like. I came up in film school, but sometimes people will show you films in the canon and they’re just like: Oh my goodness, isn’t this brilliant? And inside I was like: This is boring — this is whack. Really pay attention to what you like, pay attention to the patterns. What do they have in common? What are their ingredients? And then, once you’ve created a couple pieces of work you can look back on, examine what the patterns are in that. It wasn’t until my fourth short film that I saw what I was interested in.

Community is also so important. Give to your community, and don’t be afraid to receive from your community or ask for help. You’re not supposed to do this alone. This is one of the most collaborative art forms. This is not about doing things alone. There are so many good people out there — especially women and women of color — who believe in mentorship. They’re there. They’re all around you.

This is the question I get asked the most at Q&As. And I hear what they mean to ask, but sometimes what I feel like I’m being asked is: Tell us how hard it is as a woman of color in this industry. And I didn’t really have that hard of a time. I’m not saying that I haven’t met challenges, but I will say that I think I’ve had a decent time so far because of the communities of people that I trusted and leaned on who offered their support. It started with my internship at New York Women in Film and Television, and I’ve had so many incredible mentors between now and then. Again, it’s about giving yourself permission and paying attention to what you like — because what you like is who you are, and the simplicity of that is so freeing.