Emerging filmmaker Madeleine Gottlieb (Snare, Laura) derives a great deal of inspiration from her darkly comic Jewish family. “The best material always comes from them, and then I judge my own creative capability on how much I diverged from that,” she says. “Fortunately, or unfortunately, I tend to laugh at most things that I find to be difficult or challenging, as a bit of a coping mechanism. And I think that’s actually also a very deeply Jewish way of approaching some really dark stuff, particularly given the not-so-distant history.”
All four of her grandparents are Holocaust survivors, which gives birth to a very one-the-nose joke about tattoos in her latest short film, You and Me, Before and After. It has been selected to screen as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) Short Cut selection. The joke would never work if it weren’t drawn from her family's particular way of processing the past. “There are the people who just kept on surviving, and others who tried to live again, and my family were very much of that ilk,” she adds. “And so we’ve always approached everything with a sense of humour.”
Orange is the New Black alumna Yael Stone and Please Like Me’s Emily Barclay play two sisters who, while they love one another, have a fractious relationship. It’s not immediately apparent why they have chosen to get tattoos together, until an emotionally tender reveal at the finale as they compare results. What is clear is that they have history.
Source: Lisa Tomasetti
“The film’s circumstances are invented, and sort of speak to some things that have history in my family,” the director says. “It was about putting these two people in a situation that they couldn’t escape from, that was challenging on multiple levels, and how they navigate that, given the immense amount of baggage they share.”
Stone recently returned to live in Australia. She hasn’t done short films since shortly after graduating from drama school, but she could see real opportunity in exploring this material. “I’ve never played a Jewish person on screen,” she says. “My grandmother also survived the Holocaust. I’ve never gotten to reach into that part of my life, or be who I am onscreen, and I am now looking to Mads as somebody who can tell that story a bit differently.”
Madeleine Gottlieb on set Source: Renata Dominik
It’s a story rarely seen on our screens, Stone notes. “It’s pretty invisible in Australia. But there is a Jewish experience here and it’s really rich and interesting. And I should say, I’m not a practising Jew, I’m a terrible Jew, but I’m definitively Jewish, which, of course, is a paradox.”
She was drawn in by Gottlieb’s layered screenplay. “As a book reader, I think about a well-made short story and what an incredible skill that is, and how, as a form, it’s so exposing of skill and ability,” Stone says. “It’s like a poem. It needs to find its place and then reveal itself quickly, but not be heavy-handed somehow.”
Barclay says that Gottlieb’s remarkable confidence, for a relatively new filmmaker, made it really easy to settle into the role alongside Stone. “It was so well observed,” she says of the screenplay. “Then, when we got in the room together, it just flowed and was easy and fun. And things came up. We found telling each other very embarrassing secrets and it was like magic.”
She had expected to be a little spooked by her co-star. “Yael is incredible, so I was a bit scared, but she’s so warm, open and playful, and she just goes wherever you want to go.”
That generosity helped them find sisterhood, and it brought the almost all-women crew together tight. “It creates that vibe between the characters and with everybody on set, ‘Okay, cool, we’re just gonna do it’,” Barclay adds.
Yael Stone and Emily Barclay Source: Lisa Tomasetti
Filmed in Sydney in January 2020, the oncoming global storm meant that most of You and Me, Before and After’s post-production had to happen remotely. “Which was challenging and made the process a little bit protracted, but yeah, we were the lucky ones, I think, in that respect,” Gottlieb says of getting it in the can just in the nick of time. Debuting at the Melbourne International Film Festival, it’s now playing at TIFF. “It was amazing to get into Toronto, definite bummer that we can’t be there though.”
In the running for both Best Film and the Share Her Journey Award for best film by a woman in TIFF’s Short Cut Awards, it’s a remarkable achievement for Gottlieb, who did not go to film school. “This has really been my training ground. All of the opportunities that I’ve been lucky to have been given as a writer and director have come off the back of the previous short films I’ve made. So to me, they’re vital in terms of carving out a place in the landscape here and abroad.”
Small films like You and Me, Before and After can pack a big punch, Gottlieb adds. “I think the power of short filmmaking is sort of boundless, in terms of being a career escalator. It’s a way of really testing out who you are, what your voice is as a filmmaker, the kind of stories you want to tell, and what you want to say.”
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