Made with the help of her dad on a caravan park, the roots of this sexual psychodrama ended up being an awakening for the director herself
A few years ago, the writer-director Claire Oakley wrote a script for a short film, based on one of her dreams. “It was just a girl, following another girl, through some streets in a foreign town,” she explains, via Zoom, from her home in east
London. She submitted it to a writers’ scheme and was accepted on to a retreat in Croatia with 20 other writer-directors, all of whom had to read each other’s work. “This guy came up to me on the first day, and said: ‘Oh, so you’re a lesbian, then.’ And I was like: what? He thought the work was about female desire. And I didn’t know what he was talking about, thought he was really weird, and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the week.” At the time, Oakley explains, she was in a heterosexual relationship. “I was actually married to a man.”
She is now married to a woman. Back in Croatia, the thought had “not ever really popped into my conscious mind”, and the short film was never made. “I could never figure out what was happening, or why she was following someone, so it never came to fruition,” she says. “Then about five years passed, and things changed in my life, and I came out, and during all that, I thought back to him, and his interpretation of that piece of work, and realised that maybe he’d been completely right.”