Lycanthropy serves as a metaphor for burgeoning queer desire in My Animal from director Jacqueline Castel. Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez) is a benchwarmer on her local hockey team and deals with an alcoholic mother at home. Adding to her misery is the fact that she’s confined to her quarters during each full moon due to a dangerous transformation occurring within her. She finally finds a salve in Jonny (Amandla Stenberg), a figure skater who recently moved to town. Desperate to flee from her myriad problems, Heather hopes that Jonny will join her on the journey to society’s outskirts. Edited by […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 4, 2023Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? My Animal was not an easy shoot—we shot nights in the dead of winter in an isolated community in Northern Ontario. While there were a lot of challenges, the biggest and most obvious crisis we faced as a team was a COVID shutdown that resulted in a two week suspension of the shoot. This was what I had feared the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 4, 2023