Honestly, this is just how I remember my childhood.... Growing up on a property in rural Queensland, Australia, as a child, large parts of my day were spent playing impassioned games of make-believe with my friends that would sometimes feel so real that we would give ourselves nightmares. These childhood memories formed the story about Augie & Celeste along with an investigation of the complexities and potency of young female friendship - an intimacy that I find to be unique to the feminine experience. It's a film about testing boundaries and the importance of imaginary play when it comes to exploring and processing complicated ideas of womanhood that lie before us from a very young age. I wanted to show what 9 year old girls with scraped knees are actually thinking about and the strange things they would get up to hidden from the view of adults. Bringing this film to life became a surprisingly vulnerable exploration of my own complicated relationships with the women in my life and my now not-so-secret turbulent feelings toward motherhood, as a career driven woman in her mid 30's. I wanted the film to feel like a hyperreal dream sequence or a vivid memory. All senses feel heightened and just a little warped. To help this along, I chose to shoot on 16mm film because of it's dreamy and naive quality that seemed fitting for this nostalgic project. Cinematographer, Nyssa Mitchell, and I came up with a cinematic language for the film which included the use of wide lenses to differentiate the imaginary world from the real world. 9mm lenses were reserved for maximum unhinged effect. As a femme-centric story and in an industry that still lacks gender diversity at it's top levels, it was important to me to have mostly women / non-binary crew in the head of department roles, which I'm proud to say we achieved.