Fantasia International Film Festival is one of the premier genre film festivals in the country, with over 100 new sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and cult cinema movies debuting every year. While it didn’t debut at Fantasia Fest (that honor belongs to SXSW this year), A Safe Distance reigned as one of the best movies at the festival.
Listen to our full conversation with Director Gloria Mercer and cast members Bethany Brown and Tandia Mercedes here and read an abridged portion of the interview below.
An eighty-five-minute thriller, A Safe Distance follows Alex (Bethany Brown) as she goes camping with her long-time partner in the forest of Canada. Shortly into their stay, Joey (Chris McNally) pops the question to Alex. She says no. And, well, things don’t go as expected after that. Alex awakes the next day to find Joey gone and herself alone in the woods. By pure happenstance, she runs into a couple, Kianna (Tandia Mercedes) and Matt (Cody Kearsley), and finds refuge. But not all is what it seems, as Kianna, Matt, and soon Alex all possess their own secrets that slowly begin to see the light of day.
Director Gloria Mercer talked about working with screenwriter Aiden West and how she had always wanted to make a film that “is about contemporary relationships, toxic masculinity,” and being in a relationship “where it feels like you are not being true to yourself”. She then adds that Aiden used the term “feeling like a supporting character in your own life” as a guiding light for making the movie.
Similarly, Bethany spoke on shooting the movie and how her co-star Cody taught her about “healthy boundaries, enthusiastic consent, [and] owning your menu of what you like sexually”. After catching the reference to The Invite, Bethany enthusiastically pointed at the camera and mentioned how much she loved that movie and how intertwined they really are when it comes to sexual honesty in your own life. She added that the same idea goes for men “who were tasked with sexually knowing what to do and teaching the person that they’re with in bed from a very early age before they even knew what to do”, harkening to the sexual expectations of genders within society.
When speaking to the ending of the film, something that can be received as rather ambiguous, Tandia said, “I’d like to think that it’s a happy ending, but we really don’t know”, echoing how this movie is designed within the vein of Bonnie & Clyde or other similar films. Gloria added that the idea of what happens next to the characters is something that she “wanted people to be left with, not sealed up really tightly.”
A Safe Distance has currently has distribution secured for the US and Canada but does not have an official release date.
Interview Courtesy of Ethan Simmie
Feature Image Courtesy of Fantasia Film Festival