Emily Ryder is a Toronto-based writer and director who is passionate about telling stories that explore the complexity of intergenerational relationships through the lens of queer becoming and womanhood. In 2022 they were awarded the Emerging Filmmaker Award by the UN Women USA GCC and were selected as one of ArtworxTO’s 52 Emerging Artists. Their work has been recognized by institutions like the Canadian Society of Cinematographers, Cinema Audio Society, & the Canadian Cinema Editors Association, and their short films have screened internationally at festivals like Edinburgh International Film Festival, St John’s International Women’s Film Festival, & Toronto’s Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival. Emily is currently in development on a number of short form projects, including her next short film, Mothering, which is being generously supported by The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, Charles Street Video, & Mississauga Arts Council. Looking ahead, Emily hopes to continue to develop her creative voice within the landscape of contemporary Canadian film, television, and media, & when it’s not her turn to speak, she hopes to use her diverse skillset to amplify the voices of her peers. Emily’s film Alfie was part of Breakthroughs’ 2022 Reflections program, and won the Audience Choice Award.
Could you talk a bit about your own background as a filmmaker/artist?
Growing up, I lived in a household that was very supportive of the arts, which eventually led to my path of becoming a filmmaker. I had no idea as a kid or as a teenager that that could even be a job, but my parents were very encouraging of things – they signed me up for piano lessons, they let me get involved in community theatre, I took visual art classes at the local community centre. I feel like I was really blessed in that way, just very, very lucky to have grown up in a family that wanted to support the arts. Eventually when it came time to pick a path after secondary school, after high school, I initially decided to study Math and I very quickly realized that that was a horrible decision. I had always been involved in theatre in high school, that had become my favourite thing, and I loved English class. I just loved storytelling so much and I guess, even though I did like Math – and I still think Math is a very beautiful field – I quickly realized it wasn’t the right path for me because I realized that storytelling was what I needed to dedicate my life towards. I also wasn’t sure what that meant, but I had a friend who was in film school and who spoke really highly of it. She was one of the people that knew since she was like 12 that she wanted to be a filmmaker. I guess I dealt with a little bit of imposter syndrome before jumping into it because there were these people who had always known, so how do I know that this is for me? But that was kind of my path as an artist. I went to film school and I graduated a year ago.
Still from Alfie
Where did the inspiration come from for Alfie? What inspired you to tell that story in particular?
I’m really inspired by my family’s own history and the kind of quieter stories that come from my parents’ generation and my own as well. With Alfie, it was in part based on my uncle’s childhood, growing up gay during the Quiet Revolution in Montréal, as well as my own experience coming to terms with my own queer identity and navigating a world that isn’t necessarily very kind to people who are different. I grew up in Catholicism, I went to church every Sunday, I went to Catholic school and there wasn’t this openness to people who were different. With Alfie I really wanted to tell a story about hope and about perseverance and accepting who you are, and a bit of maybe the mourning that comes with that. When you grow up in a world and you’re told that this is going to be what your life is going to be, and you figure out quite young that that isn’t going to work out, that you aren’t going to become that person, there’s a level of, I think, mourning that you feel for that life that you’re never going to have. But there’s also, of course, the joy and the wonder of the life you will have. So I wanted to just explore a story that balanced those things – family expectations and being your own individual.
What is the message you wanted to get across through Alfie?
From the beginning, the thing that was our guiding light with all of the decisions we were making as a film crew was that we wanted to tell a story that showed that young queer children had the agency and the power to write their own narratives and control their own futures. Dealing with kids – and they were so young, both of them, and the characters were so young – it was also important to really embody the childlike wonder that comes with self-discovery at that age and show the joy of it, as well. Never forget that there is joy, it’s not all scary.
Who are some of your favourite filmmakers and what work have you been watching recently that resonated with you or that you would recommend?
I’m a huge fan of Céline Sciamma – practically everything that she’s put out. I saw her latest film, Petite Maman, at TIFF last year and generally, I think all of her feature films deal with queer identity, but this one didn’t. It was just posing this question, like, what would it be like if you were to meet your parents when they were your age? Or to meet your mom when she was your age? That’s a question I’ve always wondered, myself, and it just felt so insane to watch onscreen without even knowing that the film was going to be about that and to see that concept explored. Some of her work also directly inspired Alfie – her feature film, Tomboy, was a major influence, especially for the way that it captured its lead character, who’s a young trans boy, very empathetically. I find a lot of queer and trans cinema is very othering with the cinematography, and the gaze coming from behind the camera is very cis, very heteronormative and it just gives this othering experience. It really separates you from the people that you’re supposed to be empathizing with, whereas [Céline’s] work in Tomboy, I felt, there are just these quiet scenes where [Mickaël, the main character] is standing in the bathroom and just looking at himself in the mirror. There’s no cut to close-up or hyper-, hyper-close-up of the face or anything; you’re kind of allowed to just look at Mickaël the way that Mickaël looks at himself, and I love that.
I’m also a huge fan of Emma Seligman. Her debut feature, Shiva Baby, is so brilliant and hilarious. I’d definitely recommend everyone to watch it. I think she’s also working on a new feature now, her second, I think it’s called Bottoms. But yeah, the way she explores bisexuality in film I really love because I don’t think that there is much bisexual representation in film. And she infuses humor with these really great existential questions about womanhood, and what our relationship to sex is, where we belong in this big patriarchal equation.
TIFF had a Nordic women filmmaker series on in the last few months, so I saw a bunch of movies there and I came across work by Iram Haq, who’s a Norwegian-Pakistani screenwriter and director. I loved everything she did, too – I Am Yours and What Will People Say. Just kind of capturing flawed women, women who make terrible choices and humanizing them. At the end of the day they’re still people and still deserving of our empathy and our compassion. I feel like a lot of times, women onscreen have to live up to perfect archetypes and so I’m just a fan of any filmmaker that tries to subvert that, and tries to show you women who aren’t making the best choices.
Still from Alfie
What has been the best piece of advice you’ve received so far in your filmmaking journey?
I think the best advice I’ve gotten is to watch as many films, especially short films, as I possibly can, without overburdening myself. You need to also have a life in order to write things that are interesting. So I guess it’s kind of two fold. One, really take time to consume film and films that are by directors that maybe you haven’t ever heard of or from countries whose national cinema you aren’t familiar with. Just expand your own palate because it’ll just make you a better filmmaker and a more literate filmmaker. And on the other side of that is, have a life outside of film. Maintain your relationships and just make sure that you’re taking care of yourself in that way, because it can be so easy to just be so absorbed in any career. But if your goal is to write something that speaks truth to humanity, you need to be out there living your life and be experiencing humanity. You can’t just be holed up and watching movies and writing all the time, you need to go out and live too.
What is next for you?
I’m working on a new short film – it’ll be my first short film outside of film school. It’s currently titled, Mothering, and it’s being supported by a few great local organizations like Charles Street Video, LIFT (the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto), and the Mississauga Arts Council. So that’s really exciting to know that [these organizations] have some faith in the story I want to tell, and want to see it happen. It's a short film, like I said, and it explores my own experience with compulsory heterosexuality and how that was compounded growing up as a teenager in a Catholic school setting. It’s also a meditation on the imperfect ways that we carry the weight of trauma while also having to take care of those who are responsible for our trauma. So it’s heavy but I’m really excited to dig more into it in the coming months.
Still from Alfie
Interview by Emily Ferguson
*This article has been edited for clarity