Erica Rose and Chelsea Moore are the team behind Sour Peach Films. Together they are aiming to bring more queer stories to screen, and provide an opportunity for female experiences and sexuality to be voiced honestly.
I was able to speak with the duo about themselves, their hopes for Sour Peach Films and their newest short Girl Talk (which Erica wrote and directed)!
This is Kristy Strouse from Film Inquiry. Can you tell us a bit about yourselves?
Erica Rose: I’m a Brooklyn based director, writer, and producer who loves nerding out about everything from Chantal Akerman to Nan Goldin to 70’s Disco. I sometimes lock myself in my room and cry to Dusty Springfield songs. I’m unapologetically upfront about female sexuality and I make movies about underrepresented female and queer experiences. All I ever want to do is eat oysters with someone who wants to take down the patriarchy with me.
Chelsea Moore: A former homeschooled, Southern Baptist, Preacher’s grandkid from rural TN, I’m currently a Brooklyn-based producer working in narrative & documentary film. I also work as a Local USA 829 Art Coordinator for TV and film. I work to cultivate spaces for queer creators to explore & showcase the queer experience.
How did Sour Peach got started?
Erica Rose: As one journalist put it well, Sour Peach Films was born out of frustration. We were frustrated with not just the lack of queer femme stories, but the lack of these stories being told by actual queer femme people. Chelsea and I realized we had similar goals as filmmakers and teamed up to create the company. Sour Peach focuses on stories about female sexuality, portraits of individuals who are often forgotten or overlooked in mainstream media, and exploring identity within new contexts.
That’s incredible, and it is a much needed perspective! How did you two first meet?
Erica Rose: We met on a CBS pilot called For Justice (which never made it to air). The pilot was directed by Ava DuVernay. Chelsea was the art coordinator and I was the producer’s assistant!
Chelsea Moore: I saw Erica on a crowded Queens-bound G train…on my way to my first day of For Justice.
Let’s talk about your short Girl Talk. What is it about?
Erica Rose: Girl Talk follows 20-something Mia, as she explores the disparity between emotional and physical intimacy, coming to a head when she meets an intriguing couple. The film is centered around the complexities of sex, love and intimacy through the lens of Mia. Girl Talk is about the in-between. It is not the coming out story, it’s not about a secret affair, no one dies at the end. We’re showing queer stories that are happening now, that represent the stories we’ve experienced and the stories of our young Brooklyn queer community.
Erica, what’s your writing process like? Was this story personal for you?
Erica Rose: Girl Talk is semi-autobiographical and combines my experiences with other people’s experiences from our community, as well as fiction. A couple years ago, I started writing a feature film and found myself frustrated with the outcome. I felt as if I wasn’t being honest with myself and my own experiences and it was being reflected through my work. I decided to challenge and confront myself in a way that was acutely vulnerable and personal. Never had I written anything that was taken from my life, and I knew that in order to advance myself as an artist in the way I wanted to, I had to approach topics that were unresolved.
Girl Talk is about a time in my life where I used sex to gain agency and control over people because I was so afraid of what it meant to be truly intimate with someone. It was a lonely, dark period, but since making this film, I’ve finally begun to make peace with that part of my life. The most important element of the film is accepting vulnerability. When Mia finally strips down all of her (crumbling) walls, she’s left with a raw, vanquished, inescapable confrontation of herself, a confrontation that will be difficult, yet beautiful and rewarding. It’s one step closer to finding true intimacy.
As I was writing the film, I became more and more fascinated with how our community talks to one another. There’s frank and unapologetic discussion about sex, and yet so much of our vulnerability is being masked by silence and misdirection. This is represented through Mia. She discusses sex confidently with her friends, and yet the film is about what Mia IS NOT saying to the people around her and especially herself. In terms of my writing process, I tend to write a draft in one sitting – words tend to pour out of me, hence the length of this answer to your question! Chelsea worked with me a lot on the script to make it more palatable for a narrative and less focused on the actual events that inspired the story. One important element to note is that when I cast Hannah Hodson as the lead, we made it a priority to work together in how we incorporated race into the film. Hannah and I went through Mia’s dialogue and actions so that it felt authentic and voiced by a woman of color.
Well put! What’s the most important element that you look for in a project?
Chelsea Moore: As a creative producer the most important element for me is the team! This industry is brutal and there’s never money to properly compensate the work that is put into projects like these. What attracted me to Girl Talk (and then Sour Peach Films) was who Erica is as a person and artist. Same for the doc director I’m working with now, Caitin Stickels. They’re vulnerable, tender and unflinchingly bold in the work they are exploring.
Erica Rose: From an artistic standpoint, the most important question I ask myself is did I do everything I could to tell this story in the way it deserves to be told? I hold myself to high standards and work exhaustingly to give my all to not just the story, but to my collaborators around me. And to echo Chelsea’s answer, our team is so important. Film is the most collaborative artistic medium and a director is no one without her crew and actors. We made it a priority to surround ourselves with like-minded, progressive, diverse department heads and actors and we’ll continue to do that with all of Sour Peach’s projects moving forward.
Excellent! What’s the response been like with Girl Talk showing at festivals?
Erica Rose: First off, everyone is enraptured by the performances. Because Hannah was attached to the project from the beginning, Chelsea and I felt very confident in going for the actors we wanted, with the help of our amazing casting director Matt Glasner. Every actor in this film is brilliant. It was my dream cast and the audience definitely agrees with me. People are also blown away by our cinematography and design, which does not surprise me because we fought to get, in my opinion, the best non-union production designer and cinematographer working in New York today. On a more story level, so many people, of varied demographics, have come up to me or Chelsea and have expressed so much affinity to Mia and what she faces in this story. I do not need the validation of a straight, cis, white man, but it does speak to the universal truth of Girl Talk when one comes up to me after the film in tears saying how much he related to this film. Our goal was to always make people feel something, so we hope we continue to do that as we take the film around the world.
Chelsea Moore: From a festival programming side, it’s been wild. Erica & I made an emotional drama, but we’ve been programmed in these salacious “late night”, “kinky” and “thriller” blocks. I feel like they don’t know what to do with a film like Girl Talk and that’s both frustrating and thrilling!
What are you hoping audiences will take away from Girl Talk?
Erica Rose: I want this film to cement that queer women have agency over their sexuality. This is a deviation from the male gaze, and a reclamation of a narrative that has been systematically taken away from us. Ultimately, I want people to relate to how complicated sex and intimacy can be! It’s an ongoing dialogue that evolves and changes throughout one’s life.
Chelsea Moore: I want audiences to feel seen. This film is entrenched in and only possible because of our femme-focused, queer Brooklyn community. It is for us/them. The conversations we’re having after each screening with audiences, other filmmakers and festival staff, strengthens my belief that this work is a kind of political activism for myself.
What other projects are you working on now?
Erica Rose: Chelsea and I are currently developing an episodic anthology series based on Girl Talk about queer, femme sexuality in Brooklyn, NY. I’m also working on adapting a short story collection into a feature that we’ll eventually produce.
Chelsea Moore: In addition to that, I’m producing a feature documentary about an award-winning Brooklyn drag and burlesque collective composed of trans, nonbinary and femme Drag Kings, Drag Queens and Burlesque performers. It’s a doc about Queer Church basically.
Those all sound exciting! Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Congratulations on Girl Talk and Sour Peach, and good luck on future work!
We want to thank Erica Rose and Chelsea Moore for sharing with us. For more information on Sour Peach films, click here.
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