Hannah Einbinder has been vocal for some time on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and at Cannes this week she told Deadline she considers it “an honor” to be able to speak out.
At the festival with Jane Schoenbrun’s (I Saw the TV Glow) film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, during a conversation at Deadline’s Cannes studio, Einbinder said that using her platform on this international stage “seems to me like the most obvious thing to do,” adding, “I think of all of the people whose voices have been silenced, my comrades in the industry, and also folks in Palestine specifically, and I just follow in their footsteps. I’m honored to just echo the voices of so many who came before me in doing that, and being vocal on that issue.”
Schoenbrun’s film opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes on Wednesday, and the same day, Einbinder attended a Kering Women in Motion talk where she said, “I am really pleased to join a tradition of Palestinians and Jewish allies who are committed to being vocal in a time where a lot of people shy away from that. I follow their lead.” The actor and stand-up comedian was also asked if she feared losing work, as Susan Sarandon says she has, as a consequence of voicing her opinions. Einbinder replied, “I am under no impression that my one small career could ever measure up in comparison to even one human life.”
Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in ‘Teenage Sex and Death At Camp Miasma’
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In joining forces with Schoenbrun for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Einbinder told Deadline that creatively she felt “a kinship with Jane and reading their work, and seeing their work, and also getting to know them. And I think for something to sing comedically, you just really have to have that spark. And we certainly do.”
In the film, Einbinder stars as a filmmaker who sets out to revive existing zombie slasher IP and goes in search of the original film’s now-reclusive ‘final girl’, played by Gillian Anderson.
Schoenbrun said that the film was inspired by their personal experience of transitioning. “It came from a moment in my life that was really exciting and fun, which was, you know, a year, a couple years into transition,” they said. “For the first time, I was, I think, experiencing what a lot of people experience when they’re actually teenagers, which is like a puberty that feels right. I was coming into my body. I was coming into my identity, my confidence, my power and my sexuality, for the first time.”
Schoenbrun also found the film to be a conduit for managing some of the feelings that they were trying to process at that time. “There was also getting over a lot of trauma and shame and imposter syndrome and dysphoria,” they said. “And the perfect way to talk about that in a movie was through the slasher genre, because what other genre is so awash with gender anxiety, and these depictions of these trans sexual monsters, from Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill and everything in between, who are both like these objects of desire, but also these monsters. I wanted to truly remake the iconography around those films into something that felt authentic to what I was going through.”
Anderson said she had see Schoenbrun’s previous film I Saw the TV Glow before reading this script. “The script made sense to me in light of TV glow,” she said. “I’m not sure I would have immediately understood it, had I not had the experience of watching that film, but I felt like I understood it on on so many levels.”
She said the way the film addressed feelings of ‘otherness’ “feels like a gift of understanding and compassion,” and that “anyone who has ever felt that they are on the outside of humanity or misunderstood — that’s a large proportion of humans on Earth, no matter what that that separation is, it is really identifiable.” It’s also, she added, “incredibly moving” and said “I cannot wait for people to see it.”
To see the full conversation, click on the video above.
The Deadline Studio at Cannes is sponsored by SCAD.
