How Canadian director Luis De Filippis' debut film about a family vacation leaned into trans joy
CBC
While Luis De Filippis was developing her debut feature film, Something You Said Last Night, the Canadian filmmaker recalled her childhood vacations in Florida.
It was a final family visit to the Sunshine state as an adult that held the spirit she was trying to capture in her story about Renata, a 20-something trans woman who accompanies her family on a trip to a small, lakefront resort in Ontario cottage country.
A rarity among films with trans leads, Something You Said Last Night has no climactic coming out scene, no tension related to gender identity, no trauma. It's a slice-of-life story that revels in the humour and awkwardness of an ever-changing family dynamic — an approach that felt novel to its creator.
"I think speaking for myself and speaking for the trans women I know, we're just tired. We're tired of the drama. We're tired of seeing ourselves portrayed as sad people or people who have to be brave or people who have to constantly suffer on screen," the Toronto director told CBC News in an interview. "My life is not like that."
Renata constantly fights with her entitled sister, Sienna who, naturally, is also her best friend; she loves and sometimes neglects her quiet father Guido; she contends with boisterous mom Mona's lofty expectations. When is she going to quit vaping? When is she going to wise up and get a real job? (Unbeknownst to mom, Renata's been unemployed for months).
The main cast spent a month filming at the Fern Resort north of Toronto, arriving a few days before production began to have their own vacation, drinking tequila and playing board games. As a character-building exercise, they mused about which child might be the favourite, and whether the children knew this or if they were oblivious to it.
"I just think we deserve more laughter. We deserve more laughter from our characters and we deserve more laughter in our stories," De Filippis said.
The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, is now playing in theatres across the country.
The film is steeped in appreciation for the Italian family on which it is loosely based. The characters' patience with each other unravels between pop singalongs in the mother tongue and phone calls to nonna, Renata's unseen grandma.
De Filippis pulled from her own experiences growing up in an Italian-Canadian family, exploring how those trips abroad could shift the way they interacted.
"It was weird because the places were exactly the same, but we were different as people, and our relationships to one another [were] different. And that's what I think the film is kind of based on," the director said.
"It's about this experience of going on vacation with these people who know you the best but also … have a very particular idea of who you are."
That's where the film's well-known executive producer came in: Julia Fox, the Italian-American actor who co-starred in the 2019 drama Uncut Gems starring Adam Sandler, got hold of a Something You Said Last Night screener when it was sent to her by a friend who also knew De Filippis.
Fox was reminded of her own family: the closeness, the lack of boundaries, "the kind of love that you just didn't question," she told CBC News during the film's Toronto premiere.
