Rounding off our series of interviews with this year’s British Independent Film Awards nominated directors is perhaps the project which best epitomises the ‘I’ in BIFA given that it’s a self-funded feature debut with a minuscule budget of just £150,000, which was shot on 16mm film and has been recognised in the 2024 Raindance Maverick Award category. Unfolding in Laos, Satu – Year of the Rabbit from writer/director Joshua Trigg tells the story of Bo, an aspiring photojournalist who after fleeing her abusive father encounters Satu, a Buddhist orphan whose journey to find his long-lost mother might provide her with the story she needs to secure her place at the University of Hanoi. A film whose themes of a search for identity and the determined pursuit of a creative calling echo those of its director, we talk to Josh about narrowly avoiding an eleventh hour disaster before production had even begun, creating Satu with the clear focus of making a film in Laos which would appeal to audiences there and having to wait until two weeks after principal photography concluded to view his rushes.
How did you as an English filmmaker end up making an independent film set in Laos and all spoken in Lao?
I guess there are a few different parts to that. Firstly, I never know how to label myself because I was born in London, but I was brought up in Wales and Spain so I don’t know if I even can call myself an English director. The film has elements of identity crisis so there’s a lot of that internally that I’ve always dealt with and it comes out on screen. I’ve always wanted to make feature films, that’s been my life goal since I was six years old. I knew I needed to make money to survive to make films, hence commercials, music videos, mini-docs, anything to survive while making films. That took me down to Southeast Asia and I fell in love with Laos as a country, with the people and the team down there that we were working with because they were passionate about narrative. In that week, we drove as far north as we could and came across this tiny adorable red temple. It was just this mind-blowing location within such a physically stunning country.
As you’ve mentioned Satu – Year of the Rabbit is a story about the search for identity from various perspectives, how was the writing process of getting all those stories aligned?
I started writing the film five years ago. In terms of these different threads and stories, some of them were things that I had been working on since I was like 15 years old and are rehoused in these characters. There is quite a lot of plot in it and looking at the film now, I think there’s an endearing quality to all of it. There’s something childlike about the whole film and I think that that’s kind of why it still works. Whereas I plan to grow and refine these elements, actually considering the characters’ motivations it really holds them up in a nice childlike light that works for the film in the end.
You’ve got the main plot which is obviously this girl trying to find Satu’s mother with him essentially so that she can write this story and get into the university in Hanoi. They are both different versions of me. I wanted to be a film director, that’s why she was a photojournalist. I was trying to understand my childhood relationship with my non-existent father, and this boy’s trying to find his mother. They’re simple character arcs that cross over. The biggest challenge was trying to figure out if it should be a duo thing or do I weigh it more on one character. Ultimately I weighed it on her a little bit more as it’s easier for an audience to with one main character, as it was my first feature I wanted it to feel a little bit more defined and focus on her.
I almost see the whole project as a study really at this stage, even though it took my whole life to get to this point, it still very much feels like learning curve number one.
Then you’ve also got the mother in the background which, without ruining it, there’s a reveal that happens there. She’s learning about what it feels like to abandon her child. She’s obviously ignored that and she discovers this washed up North Korean dude on the run from North Korea who she kind of nurses back to health, who also has had to abandon his family. So they deal with this abandonment together. There are a lot of abandonment themes in the whole film which is clearly something personal that I spewed out into the script. I almost see the whole project as a study really at this stage, even though it took my whole life to get to this point, it still very much feels like learning curve number one. It’s been an interesting journey.
You went ambitious for a self-financed debut and decided to shoot on 16mm, although I did read that some kit was misplaced right before you left for the shoot.
Yeah, the lens was left on the tube the day before we were supposed to fly out! Somehow James Chegwyn, the DP, tracked it down in Brixton and the guy had the box that the lens was supposed to be in but he was like, “It’s empty though!” and James started breaking down and crying. It was in there, the guy was just mucking about. It was the worst time to fuck around with him! Everything was self-funded, it was 85% self-funded. We had refurbished all this stuff and had a very specific way we wanted to shoot it, so if that lens didn’t turn up that was more money I just wouldn’t be able to get.
There’s so much madness that happened from poisonous snakes to having half the crew in hospital on drips because the village well water well was poisoned to the camera breaking down 10 days into shooting because all the drive belts and magazines were burning out from the heat.
Everything was on a shoestring budget. That’s why I’m happy it sits in this BIFA Raindance Maverick Award space because it was £150,000 for the whole budget and we shot it on film. We had three takes max we could do basically, without running out of film while we were out there. It was during the pandemic, there was one flight into the country every two months and one flight out every month, so it was like you either do it when you’re there or you don’t do it at all. So when we were there, we had to just do it. It was very difficult. I had half the funding pulled, which was supposed to come from a job that I had completed, and the third-party agency that the job was running through fell out with their client who then refused to pay them any money, so we lost our budget upon arrival, which meant I had to find money as we were shooting.
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There’s so much madness that happened from poisonous snakes to having half the crew in hospital on drips because the village well water well was poisoned to the camera breaking down 10 days into shooting because all the drive belts and magazines were burning out from the heat. We had all these parts sent over from Germany and Amsterdam but we couldn’t fix it so we had to get a camera driven up from Bangkok to the north of Laos. You could only get there by boat, so we had to smuggle it across the river. We also had to smuggle the film out of the country because we couldn’t do everything in the time frame that they needed it to be in this bureaucratic way spending two weeks waiting for paperwork. I was like, it’s now or never, we have to do it because we just don’t have any money!
Having shot on film not fully knowing what you had, how was the editing process once you got home?
Because we had such a small amount of film, it was kind of shot how it was supposed to be shot and edited how it was supposed to be edited. There weren’t many other ways to cut the film. I think it’s pretty much as per the script. It was more a case of tightening it from a two-hour cut down to an hour and a half. We didn’t see any of the footage until we finished shooting because we couldn’t send dailies back and I didn’t even have a monitor for the first 10 days, it was just all through the viewfinder. So it was very old school filmmaking, which is great, it’s a good way to learn. I’ve been making films commercially and music videos and shorts forever, but the experience of this film was really learning in the trenches just with a camera and filming a bunch of people who aren’t actors. It was a fun way to do it.
When we got back, edit-wise I did the first six cuts. I did all the subtitle translating myself and then I’d get it checked back out in Laos. Then around the seventh cut, I needed more perspective and I got my regular editor Nick Saunders in to give me a hand wrapping it up and give his take. I needed it because I was doing so much on my own at that point. I was like, “I don’t even like this! I don’t know what to do with this? Should I just bail? I can’t bail, I’ve spent all the money that I don’t have!” I think I needed someone to be like, “No, let’s not…just trust me on this, let’s go that way.” I’ve known Nick for a long time so I’m excited to work with him on the next one and have him on board from the beginning.
We didn’t see any of the footage until we finished shooting because we couldn’t send dailies back and I didn’t even have a monitor for the first 10 days, it was just all through the viewfinder.
I was so impressed to learn that you worked with non-professional actors, was that always the plan?
Yeah, that was always the plan, as it was always the plan to shoot on film. Ever since I saw Bicycle Thieves in university 16, 17 years ago, I loved that the kid is a non-actor. I think that you can get the most honest performance out of a non-actor, though they still need the right kind of attention. With kids, if you find the right person then you don’t really have to do anything at all. I don’t believe in giving too much direction to the actors and I enjoy the process of getting a performance out of someone who has no clue how to act.
With this process, Itthiphone Sonepho and Vanthiva Saysana were actually the first people we found. They were presented to us in this search but I thought, “I can’t just go with it, it’s insane to choose the first two people.” So we spent two months searching and then went straight back to the first choice, which says a lot about the team in Laos and how creative they are. They thought these guys would be right, that’s who they presented first and they were right, but I had to make sure and go through the process.
Having worked so hard to put all the pieces of Satu together, what does the BIFA nomination mean to you as a truly independent film?
It’s interesting to see how each country takes the project, I think that’s been the most fascinating part of it. I wanted to make a Laos film and if it’s relevant to people in Laos we’ve done a good job and we’ve made an honest film. Then if people like it elsewhere, that’s great. It’s hard to get a film made at the end of the day, it costs a load of money whether you do it independently or not. Definitely for myself and some people around me in a similar age range who are trying to make features, there’s always this feeling that maybe there’s not enough support. I think the reality is everyone feels like that. So it does mean a lot to me, and especially that it represents specifically independent film because, at the end of the day, my film is still the lowest budget film in there and was shot on film. Which is obviously a stupid, stupid thing to do, but I knew that it was a gamble I was willing to take.
The experience of this film was really learning in the trenches just with a camera and filming a bunch of people who aren’t actors. It was a fun way to do it.
It means a lot because it just means that someone’s taking note of it. That’s what was the most important thing to me, and Raindance what it represents is really critical and it made sense for it to play there and be in that BIFA category. It’s kind of given me a bit more faith in the British film industry again and made me a bit more excited to be here making films. It means a lot more than just the award actually. It’s like, “Okay, all right, cool we still want to make stuff that’s a little bit different” because I did feel like it’s hard to make stuff that is off the wall and to get any support for it. That definitely didn’t happen with this film, but now I’ve made it, I feel at least there’s a celebration of it.
