Meet Eva Steinmetz, One of the 5 Winners of the 6th Annual Focus Features & JetBlue Student Short Film Showcase

The Gotham Film & Media Institute announced that Eva Steinmetz’ short film Marina is one of five works chosen by a special jury of filmmakers, curators, and critics for the Focus Features & JetBlue Student Short Film Showcase. Created as her MFA thesis film for Temple University, Marina was selected out of a pool of projects from a wide range of graduate programs.

In Marina, strange leaks start dripping from the ceiling of the house where Marina (Grace McLean) works as the caregiver for her aging father (Peter Friedman). As the situation worsens, Marina ends up in her father’s bedroom where they share a peaceful moment that is a half-oceanic, half-domestic period of otherworldly grief.

We asked Steinmetz to tell us a little about the inspiration for her film, the artists who influenced her, and her plans for the future.

Follow her on Instagram @believa_me and learn more about her at www.evasteinmetz.org.

Where did the idea for Marina come from?

A lot of my projects start with a sensation in my body. During times of immense grief and being overwhelmed, I have felt like I’m moving through water while everyone else continues to live in air. I especially associate that feeling with my experience being a teenager and watching my mom care for her dying father. The characters and events in Marina are very different from those in my family, but the physical sensation is a biographical throughline.

How did you find your cast?

Grace McLean is a longtime friend and collaborator in my theater work. We wrote—along with a dear composer friend—a musical called Penelope. Grace agreed to be in the film while I was still writing it, and during one of our many conversations about the relationship between Marina and her father, Grace suggested that Peter Friedman play the part of the father. She’s known him for many years and had a hunch that he’d be game. I still can’t believe he said “yes!”

What in the film most captures what you saw in your mind when you first imagined the story?

Eating ice cream underwater. It’s one of the first images I had in my head while writing the script, and it became the technical challenge that the whole crew rallied behind.

How did you work with your production designer to put together the layers of objects that define Marina's house?

Our production designer, Shayna Strype, is a super hero. She’s also a brilliant animator—look up her work! We had three different design categories we worked on together: the house and all the objects; the ceiling drips and natural growth; and the final underwater world. For all the categories, we had an iterative process in which I gathered research imagery and she gathered objects and plant matter. Together, we had an accumulation of ideas and possibilities so, when we finally got to set, we were able to really play and figure out how we wanted Marina’s world to look and feel.

What was the biggest lesson learned working on Marina?

None of us had ever filmed “dry-for-wet” before, so there were some huge learning curves, just in terms of how to pull off an underwater scene with a small student budget and crew.

As an emerging filmmaker, who are your influences?

I’m endlessly inspired by the rhythms and physical architectures created by choreographers like Pina Bausch, Bill T. Jones, and Dimitris Papaioannou. I love the fantasy and surrealism in the books of N.K. Jemisin, Ali Smith, and Ursula Le Guin. And I will forever be a Buster Keaton fangirl.

What was the first film you saw that made you want to be a filmmaker?

Angela Robinson’s 2004 movie D.E.B.S. was maybe the first time I saw something that made me actively jealous (in an inspiring way) that I hadn’t been part of the production. It played with genres, it had a collaborative DIY scrappiness, it featured an ensemble of women I wanted to hang out with, and it was unabashedly committed to a feeling of delight. The other film that deeply inspired me was Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement, which I am only just now realizing also came out in 2004. I guess I was especially impressionable that year.

Are you working on a feature film?

I am, and it’s in an active moment of transformation. I had been working on a love story about a woman whose property in rural California burned in a wildfire. Then, this January, my hometown of Altadena, California, burned down in the Eaton Fire, and my orientation to the story shifted dramatically. The film is now about a woman who must navigate a strange hyper-privatized web of bureaucracy to formally register her heartbreak after losing her home in a fire. It has an element of surrealism, as one of the chronic symptoms of her grief is that she regularly finds herself immersed in the earth. And it’s still a love story.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.