What a fun and exciting project this was. For the course ‘Film Practices’, we, a group of all six-women students, had the task of adapting a specific scene from a script from a pre-existing film assigned to us, and we had to choose on either changing and adapting it to a different genre, or a different style from an auteur director. We chose to adapt our given script, Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), and to transform it into the aesthetics of Sofia Coppola. We also changed some things ourselves; such as shifting the hetero-centric relationship between the protagonist and the computer into a queer story, exploring the confusions of the beginnings of relationships, boundaries, and how same-sex relationships can be confusing between of the bridge of friendship and romance.

We poured our heart and soul into this project. I had the privilege of being the cinematographer, the DOP, the storyboard creator, assisting in curating the soundtrack, and organising location scouting. To evoke a dream-like scene to also exhibit the blurriness of reality for the protagonist, I insisted that we film underwater. After emailing various hotels and going to every public pool in Amsterdam, begging if we could film underwater, we did not get anywhere - yet. After contacting some colleagues of mine who knew of somebody, we finally got the green light to shoot all afternoon and evening at a private pool up north in Hoorn, in the middle of October. Sure, the water was freezing cold, and myself and the actresses had to shoot underwater during it with the GoPro Hero 9 - but it created the effect that we wanted and ultimately contributed so much to the visual storytelling.

Our film was screened at Kriterion on November of 2023 along with the other student films - and our film was chosen as the exemplar film for the following Television Studies course, screened at the introductory lecture where we received a standing ovation.