Annapurna Sriram
Annapurna Sriram
Annapurna Sriram is a very bad girl—at least, that’s what her parents thought when they found the then-16-year-old’s MySpace account. While attending a laissez-faire performing arts high school in her hometown of Nashville, Sriram would “sneak out, go to parties and house shows,” evidence of which was plastered on this not-so-secret social media profile. As punishment, she was sent to “a fake therapy cult” boarding school. “It was really traumatizing,” remembers the Los Angeles–based writer, director and thespian. “There was no art, and I had a lot of angst.”
This experience fueled Sriram’s first storytelling effort years later, in 2017, when she appeared on The Tell, a live event and podcast hosted by a friend who eventually persuaded Sriram to co-write a screenplay heavily influenced by the pre-Code drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. “I had imposter syndrome,” she says. “But this unlocked a door. I decided that I wanted to write another script by myself.”
She had received her BFA back in 2011 from the acting conservatory at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts and immediately began securing roles, but Sriram found herself irked by limited professional prospects. “I joke that I first started experiencing racism not in Nashville or boarding school, but when I entered the industry,” she laughs. “Everything was about your race. It was the Homeland era: ‘You’re the Muslim cop, the Muslim doctor.’ I was like, ‘What would it take to play the sex worker?’”
Years of casting frustrations coupled with her first foray into writing led Sriram to pen Fucktoys, a high-camp romp following a sex worker named AP (naturally, played by Sriram) who must scrounge $1,000 to lift a mysterious curse placed on her. Myriad influences—from The Fool’s Journey card in the Tarot to John Waters—shape the emphatically sex-positive film, featuring comedic scenes of water sports and roleplay that never veer into simplistic kink-shaming. “I wanted to give brown girls their Brigitte Bardot sexpot so that they could see themselves as a cult icon and not just as the girl from Bend It Like Beckham,” she states.
But Sriram never dreamed of stepping behind the camera and credits quarantining in 2020 with providing her the time to study “film school stuff: cameras, lenses and the process of everything.” Her producers were thrilled when she revealed that she finally felt ready to helm the project herself. After a labored development process, Fucktoys had its world premiere at SXSW this past spring, where Sriram was awarded the Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate. Shot on Super 16 and capturing the “girly-pop, feminine, grandma-core dystopia” of its B movie–inspired setting of Trashtown, USA, Fucktoys instantly cemented itself as a future cult classic. “People want to come back and see it again, bring their friends, buy the merch,” she says. “They want to be a part of the world of Trashtown.”
While its festival run has been highly successful, a truly unforgettable moment for Sriram occurred in Provincetown this past June, where John Waters was also in attendance to present a screening of Pink Narcissus. “He took my hand, and he was like, ‘These old gays don’t understand the sexual revolution of young people,’” she recalls. “Whatever happens with this movie, if the Pope of Trash saw it and genuinely liked it, I’m doing something right.” He also implored her to secure distribution; “I was like, ‘We’re trying!’” While Sriram would “definitely be open” to a distributor approaching her with “a really nice, healthy acquisition,” she understands that a DIY strategy might be the film’s best bet, though she is wary of putting it on streamers. (“I don’t want this movie to just die on the vine deep on Netflix or Amazon.”)
“We are passionate about touring the movie in theaters,” she says, pointing to the success of the 2022 self-distributed comedy Hundreds of Beavers. “I have a dream of becoming a Rocky Horror movie where people could see this at midnight and dress up.” In the meantime, Sriram has several other projects percolating. One, which is already written, would be a black and white blend of Coal Miner’s Daughter and Jim Jarmusch. (“No one would ever cast me, so I’ll write myself as a renegade outlaw country girl.”) She’s also been talking with Beavers writer-director Mike Cheslik about making “a smutty ’60s ski movie, Casino Royale meets Hot Dog…The Movie.” Finally, she hopes to return to Trashtown for an episodic adventure about its citizens “building an underground guerrilla militia to guillotine the oligarchs.” “People think we’re insane or naive,” she concludes about her and her team’s eight-year journey with Fucktoys. “I just want to empower other filmmakers to hold onto your work and fight for it.”—Natalia Keogan/Image: Michael Leviton
