Expanding ‘the Canon of Film on Female Sexuality’

Amber Sealey began writing “How Does It Start” after discovering her diaries from center college. The diary entries chronicled one of many many awkward levels of puberty — the tween years when crushes start to bloom and hormones start to rage. Sealey realized that she hadn’t seen very many portrayals of this developmental stage in women on display. 

“I feel like there are a lot of films where there are boys aged 10, 11, 12 who are masturbating or spying on girls or interested in sex, and it’s normal and natural. We don’t have that same thing for young girls,” Sealey informed TheWrap. “I got interested in the idea of making this film as a missing chapter in the canon of film on female sexuality.”

Sealey’s quick, a finalist in TheWrap’s 2019 ShortList Film Festival, follows a seventh-grade woman in 1983 attempting to determine methods to get a boyfriend and perceive her sexual urges.

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She reads age-inappropriate self-help books, experiments with kissing a pal and watches her classmates’ budding relationships rigorously. While the script isn’t totally based mostly on Sealey’s life, most of the predominant character’s diary entries are.

“Some of them are lifted, verbatim, from my own diaries when I was like 11,” mentioned Sealey, who plans to broaden the 16-minute quick right into a characteristic movie with the identical predominant character and theme. 

“I hope it makes people think about the experience of female sexuality and how we have portrayed it so far on screen. There are so many other new and more nuanced ways that we can portray it,” Sealey mentioned.

Watch the movie above. Viewers may display the movies at any time through the pageant at Shortlistfilmfestival.com and vote by means of Aug. 21.