I first met Amanda and Charlie when we were all working together at Oona's, a vintage store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I liked them immediately—they were warm and fascinating people, talented artists, and I admired their relationship. At that time, I was attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, making short experimental films that dealt with ideas of identity, memory, distance, and displacement; ideas that I had previously explored in my two-dimensional art.

In 2004, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my Masters at CalArts, where these ideas continued to shape my work. My first film at CalArts, The Tropic of Faxafloi, deals literally with ideas of home and displacement. Eventually, I realized that themes of place and alienation were also thematically inherent to the film I was making as my Masters thesis--Parity.

When I had the idea to make a movie about a pregnant woman, a comment of Amanda's kept reverberating in my mind—when life was particularly dissatisfying she would say to Charlie, "let's just have a baby, and I'll paint watercolors." Aside from watercolors figuring literally in the movie, this idea became the theme of Parity; in other words, what does an artist do when she can't make art anymore?

(cont.)