When cinematographer Carolina Costa first read the screenplay for “Fancy Dance,” written by Erica Tremblay (“Little Chief”) and Miciana Alise (Debut), she cried. Costa, the film’s director of photography, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that when movies make her cry, she often feels “manipulated into (crying).” This script was different.
“It was truly the emotions I was feeling,” she said.
The film, which Tremblay also directed, tells the story of Jax (Lily Gladstone, “Certain Women”), an indigenous woman caring for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson, “Three Pines”), whose mother has gone missing. The film premiered at Sundance in January.
“I think the character of Jax was one of the things that immediately attracted me to being part of the project,” Costa said. While she couldn’t relate to every aspect of Jax’s upbringing and living environment, she identified with the “blockages in life” that Jax encountered as a queer woman.
Jax exemplifies a character whose story Costa likes to tell — “characters that are not perfect and sometimes characters that we haven’t seen on the screen,” she said. Indigenous women, especially Queer indigenous women, are rarely centered in films, if they are portrayed at all. The characters “just felt human” to Costa. Jax makes mistakes, doesn’t know how much to tell Roki about her mother’s disappearance and is inexperienced in her new caretaker role. But from the script’s characterization to Gladstone’s performance, Costa described her story as “delicate and beautiful and … real.”
With her cinematography, Costa said she hoped to maintain the characters’ humanity by portraying them without judgment and without objectifying or victimizing them. She and Tremblay were inspired by filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s camera work. Arnold films characters with empathy, and with a certain freedom.
“Even though the camera is extremely precise in what it’s telling and what it’s showing — and not showing — it is also not precious,” Costa said. “The camera was lucky to capture that moment in time, and I think that was the heart of how we wanted our camera to move and portray these people.”
For some projects, making the careful choreography of each line, color and movement clear is what works best. But this precise, “symmetrical” way of looking at the world felt wrong for “Fancy Dance.” Costa didn’t want every shot to feel “constructed.”
The film’s scenes may appear like moments captured by chance, but Costa has an intention behind the camera positioning, movement, lighting and colors in each one. Before shooting scenes in a strip club, she studied similar scenes in other films and found that many felt biased toward the perspective of men watching the women. This perspective could lead to a perception of the club workers as victims, which Costa sought to avoid throughout the film. To avoid this objectification or romanticization, she limited her use of a long lens and placed the camera at the eye level of the women working in the club rather than from a lower angle looking up.
“There’s no need of re-victimizing indigenous women over and over again,” Costa said. Tremblay and Alise held this belief when writing the screenplay as well, not wanting to represent their communities as victims. While violence is implied in the film, it is never explicitly shown: In a scene where a woman is found dead in a car, we see the man who opens the car door and the reactions of her relatives when they receive the phone call about her death, but we never see her body.
“You see how it’s affecting these people and their community, (which) is much more impactful than actually showing a body,” Costa said. The focus on the living characters and their responses keeps the film real and emotional, deepening the characters’ humanity rather than attempting to shock the viewer. The visual focus on reaction makes the unseen violence scarier, while the overuse of images of violence against indigenous women might have taken away its impact.
Tragedy is implied again at the film’s conclusion. The final scene, in which Jax and Roki dance at a powwow, is one of Costa’s favorites because it “has so much beauty, but you know, also, what’s going to happen after the movie.” The scene makes Costa cry each time she watches it.
The powwow was one of the most complicated scenes to shoot, specifically when it came to lighting. Costa considered using a crane or a big light, but that not only pushed the film’s budget but “felt wrong for the kind of style we were going for, which was much more contained.”
The solution came to Costa in a dream: She lit the set with construction lights, which were used at many of the Oklahoma powwows the crew visited in preparation for the scene. The blue lights made sense to her, too, because blue was already significant to the film. When Roki finds her mother’s stripper clothing and a DVD of them dancing at a previous powwow, the TV in the scene is blue, as is the moonlight illuminating it. Blue is Roki’s mother. It is also safety — Roki and Jax’s house and porch are blue. The club where Jax meets her lover Sapphire (Crystle Lightning, “Trickster”) is a different shade of blue, signifying another source of safety for Jax. Costa described how this color is often coded as symbolic of the past, of danger or of a cold environment. Its symbolism is different in “Fancy Dance.”
“We started playing with (the color blue) first because (Tremblay) and I talked about the importance of the moonlight in the story,” Costa said. The scene when Roki finds her mother’s things is one of only a few lit with moonlight. It is used again when Roki and Jax run through a cornfield at night, one of the most difficult scenes to film — Costa had to put a light on a crane to simulate moonlight while characters moved. Even in scenes not lit this way, Costa wanted the lighting to feel natural. She used streetlights and, in the final scene, the construction lights to make the lighting “part of the environment.”
When beginning a project, Costa said, “I like to start from zero, from scratch.” She laughed, adding, “I like to start, like, as a baby” and discover the particular style and cinematography techniques with which to approach a film’s “visual grammar.” She is careful when choosing which films to join. She admitted that “sometimes (she) might not be the right person for the project, even if (she likes) the project.” When she reads a script and feels a connection to the story and characters and understands “why these people are moving through the world in that way,” those are the projects she takes on. That sort of connection provokes ideas — images, colors, music — of how she could tell the story visually. When she doesn’t find a connection, “nothing comes up.”
Regardless of the specific cinematography Costa uses in a film, her approach always “comes from empathy and looking at people from a human perspective.” This empathetic approach extends to how she leads her film crews and supports the directors with whom she works.
Costa is now a first-time director of two short films, while also working on a new project’s cinematography. She has begun submitting the first short to festivals and recently wrapped production for the other short. Costa seems ever interested in trying something new with filmmaking, as long as she is expressing something human and true.
Of “Fancy Dance,” she said, “I think we did capture something that is honest about these people.” That achievement of honesty seems to be the heart of her work.
Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.