More than lovers were star-crossed when the Foodbank Players staged its production of Romeo and Juliet last fall. In the audience was Michele Leavy, a UC Davis drama professor, who was duly impressed with Alameda High School alumna Anika Jensen’s performance as Juliet.
“I absolutely believed her,” Leavy said. “She had that quality of being genuine and making you watch her.”
So when Oakland-based independent film director Lauren Shapiro contacted Leavy, asking her to share a casting call for her film, Still Life, with her UC Davis students, Leavy also sent the notice to Jensen, who ultimately snagged the role. Numerous other Alameda actors and an East End home will also appear in this coming-of-age romantic comedy-drama. Alameda Post explores how Still Life germinated from a secret dream to a feature-length film, its themes, and how the director aims to support local talent.
Auditions
To win the lead role of Dafne, a teen navigating adolescence while her mother fights cancer, Jensen underwent six rounds of auditions, competing against more than a hundred other actresses. “To be honest,” director Shapiro said, “I wanted Anika from the get-go. She stuck out from the start.”
Set in the Bay Area in late 1999, the film explores liminal spaces, like the space between childhood and adulthood, between two centuries, between a mother’s life and death, and between the worlds of school, friends, first love, and the ICU.
“Anika had an intelligent sensitivity that conveyed the space between innocence and maturity with subtlety and depth,” Shapiro said. “Still, I held many rounds of auditions because I knew casting the starring role was the most important decision I would make to ensure the film’s success. In addition to acting, I had Anika submit a ballet audition. I also held a ‘chemistry test,’ where she auditioned with Andrew Bova, the actor I cast to play Dafne’s romantic interest. She navigated it all beautifully.”
Once Jensen had the role, she, in turn, recommended Leavy for the role of Dafne’s mother, who faces cancer with heart and humor even while her situation is full of pathos. Still Life is autobiographical and a project of the heart for Shapiro. The film is based on the experience of losing her mother to leukemia in January 2000, one month before her own 16th birthday.
“My family teared up when they saw Michele’s performance,” Shapiro said, “not only because of some resemblance but because she captured my mother’s personality. Also, she had known Anika since Anika was little, and they were comfortable with each other. That connection between them was a gift.”
Capturing loss
With Still Life, Shapiro aims to portray loss realistically. “So often in movies, loss is portrayed as a crescendo of violent emotions with a swelling orchestra,” she said. “There is that aspect, but I wanted to depict loss more true to life, where the mundane and the profound coexist. After Dafne’s mother dies, in true Bay Area fashion, her family stops for burritos on the way home from the hospital. The film stares death in the face in a relatable way.”
Jensen hasn’t experienced any similar loss but nonetheless felt connected to Dafne as a character. “Dafne reminded me of myself in middle school and early high school,” she said. “Like Dafne, I spent a year debating and catastrophizing over the point of school. I went through a period of bending myself to others before finding myself. And I experienced mental health issues like anxiety and depression, which I tried to channel into the role.
“Before emotionally intense scenes, I asked for time to prepare,” she continued. “I imagined losing my real mom or losing Michele. I listened to the scene music and read the lyrics. I also tried to interpret the nuance of the script directions. The directions might be, ‘Stand up, look at the still life, sit at the computer, feed the fish, go downstairs.’ But I could read into that the restlessness of an emerging anxiety attack and remember what that was like.”
Becoming a filmmaker
Shapiro has wanted to make this film almost since the events depicted in it happened.
“My mother knew how transformative storytelling is,” she explained. “When bad things happen, make a story. It’s a way to cope. How can you transform what’s happening to you in a way that helps others? That has guided me my whole life. I always wanted to create this but was nervous about my finances because my mom had struggled. I studied psychology in college, but toward the end of grad school, I realized I really wanted to do creative work. I befriended filmmaker Kara Harold, who took me under her wing.”
Shapiro worked on Harold’s first narrative feature film, helping with numerous aspects and learning about filmmaking by working on set. “Then, when I sat down to write Still Life, it just spilled out of me. That was in 2013.”
Having a child and starting to teach at a university derailed Shapiro’s creative process. However, when the pandemic struck, underscoring life’s fragility, she decided to pursue her dream by taking a leave of absence. Harold encouraged her to send the screenplay to Anjali Sundaram, a cinema professor at City College of San Francisco, noting that Sundaram was a tough critic. If she liked it, that would be telling.
“The day before I heard back from Anjali, I got a call from my university saying they needed me to tell them if I was quitting or coming back,” Shapiro said. “I took a leap of faith and quit. The next day, when I met with Anjali, she told me the script had made her cry, and it deserved to be made into a film. She offered to be my director of photography. That was galvanizing.”
Supporting local talent
To kickstart her film, Shapiro launched a successful Kickstarter last fall, which led to further successful fundraising. She notes there is a movement to support Oakland filmmakers like herself through tax breaks. The goal is to make it easier to tell stories in the East Bay and for talent to remain here and live sustainably.
“I wanted to showcase local talent because in the Bay Area, there’s this reverse chicken-egg problem where talent thinks they have to move to L.A. to get work, and then when a local filmmaker like myself wants to hire, it’s hard to find people because they’ve moved away. I want to be part of reversing that,” Shapiro said.
She hired all her crew and all but one actor from the Bay Area, attracting crew who have worked on films such as The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Fremont, and Sundance award-winning film Dìdi. Besides Jensen, several Alameda students, including a fellow Foodbank Player, were cast in small roles or as extras. Six Alameda Ballet Academy (ABA) students play students at Dafne’s ballet school, and Jensen’s mother, an ABA instructor, plays Dafne’s ballet teacher.
Shapiro mostly filmed Still Life in the East Bay, including Alameda, and a little in San Francisco. Jensen’s East End home became Dafne’s home. “The landscape and locations are almost a character,” Shapiro said. “They are a shortcut to getting certain ideas across that I wouldn’t have been able to convey if I hadn’t filmed here.”
Fundraising for the home stretch
Filming started in June and mostly wrapped in early August. “Everyone has been knocking it out of the park,” Shapiro said. “I am so proud of what we’re producing. Now we’re fundraising for the final $50,000 required for the last few days of production, post-production editing, and marketing and submission fees required to get Still Life into festivals.”
They are seeking partners and executive producers “who would be interested in helping to support this independent film with a small budget but a big heart,” she said. “Specifically, we seek folks interested in investing, making tax-deductible donations through our fiscal sponsor, or coordinating an employee-match program at their company. We aim to edit the film this year and submit it to festivals by September 2025.”
Information about the film and ways to support it are available on the Still Life website.
Contributing writer Karin K. Jensen covers boards and commissions for the Alameda Post. Contact her via [email protected]. Her writing is collected at https://linktr.ee/karinkjensen and https://alamedapost.com/Karin-K-Jensen.
