It’s not every day you get to say, 'Sofia Coppola hand-selected my film to mentor me.' But Australian filmmaker Adriane Neshoda can.
For aspiring filmmakers, cinephiles and admirers of the art, Coppola has long been a reference point. Her poignant filmography has, over decades, sustained a cinematic language that is unmistakably her own: grainy light, pastel palettes, themes of female isolation. So, at the beginning of the year, when Neshoda was deciding what she wanted the months ahead to hold, Coppola had a place on her vision board. “I had put on my vision board a little picture of Sofia, and to make my first short film.” Call it fate, manifestation or an unusually specific case of being in the right place at the right time, but the vision board sitting on Neshoda’s desk would prove strangely prophetic.
Just a few months later, Neshoda discovered Decentralized Pictures through a meta ad, the nonprofit co-founded by Roman Coppola, Leo Matchett and Michael Musante to support the next generation of independent filmmakers and artists. The organisation had just announced for the first time their Sofia Coppola Short Film Award, searching for “a filmmaker with a distinct creative point of view, confident visual sensibility, and an instinct for storytelling that feels personal and unmistakably their own.” With a grant that could finance her film and a mentorship with Coppola herself up for grabs, Neshoda knew she had to apply. Then, at 7am on Sunday 23 August, her phone started going off. Having worked late the night before, she tells me she was barely out of bed when messages began arriving across Discord and Instagram. Decentralized Pictures was trying to reach her to let her know she had made the top 25 and should be ready to join the livestream, just incase...
“Holy shit! I think I've won it. Because why else would they be messaging me and chasing me up?", she remembers thinking. Still in her pyjamas, hair in a bun, Neshoda quickly made herself presentable and opened the livestream. “Before I knew it they were announcing [the winner]. I think I just blacked out.” Yes, her name was suddenly coming out of Sofia Coppola’s mouth.
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Her short film, Strange Young Girls, draws on Neshoda’s adolescence in rural South Australia and honours the powerful, resilient women who shaped her. It's been a story she has spent years avoiding, “I feel like it was the universe aligning lots of different things for me,” she says. “I had just left a really toxic work relationship. I was really burnt out. I was in a position where I was so sick of creating for others benefit and not for myself."
Writing Strange Young Girls became Neshoda’s way back to the reason she became a creative in the first place. She explains, “I felt like I’d become so far from the reason why I got into being a creative. And this project was an act of dedication to myself, and all the women in my life that have had to sacrifice their own desires for survival.”
While Strange Young Girls begins with her adolescence and the small town where she grew up, the themes it confronts of misogyny, violence and the ways young women learn to survive both are hardly confined to one place. “What’s happening in the moment in Australia with the Sydney Swans, private boys’ schools, our domestic violence rates, even just outside of Australia, across the world – women being killed,” she says. “As shit as it is, this is the type of story that’s always the right moment to tell.”
And writing it was an experience in itself. “When the script was done, it was incredibly freeing” she says. "I was in such a dark space whilst writing it, and there was such relief in exiting that headspace." It’s easy, when watching personal filmmaking, to forget what making it can demand from the person behind the camera. What eventually appears on screen as art may begin as lived experience. To turn it into a film means revisiting the trauma, turning it into scenes, writing it and, eventually, asking actors to inhabit it. As Neshoda tells me, “Now I’m like, oh my god, I actually have to make it and re-live it.”
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Neshoda has plans to shoot Strange Young Girls by the end of the year, and shares with a smile that filming will take her back to Mount Gambier, where she hopes to cast local kids and bring the landscape she grew up around into the story itself. It will also require her to learn in real time, as Strange Young Girls is her first screenplay – before even submitting it, she admits she didn't even know how to format one. “I had it in a Word document, and then I was like, uh, how do I format it properly?" she recalls. So, she took upon to Google, which led her to a free screenwriting software. And after putting it through the software, off it went – the first draft essentially untouched and into Sofia Coppola hands.
"I think the thing that I’m definitely most excited about is advice around the script,” Neshoda says, “Particularly, around the structure and the pacing of everything, and then also how that actually translates into shooting it.”After all Coppola has spent her career making films that feel undeniably her, and Neshoda wants to know how she got there; how she developed her visual language. And perhaps most importantly, how to find trust in it.
In some ways, Neshoda has spent this year beginning to answer that question for herself unknowingly. It was a year where she started making something of her own with a story she had carried with her for years – before she even knew the rules of screenwriting. And somewhere between the picture pinned to her vision board and the short film she is now preparing to make, Neshoda has landed remarkably close to where she imagined herself. She just might not have expected Sofia Coppola there by her side.
