Today we’d like to introduce you to Melisande McLaughlin.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My story doesn’t start with the usual narrative of going into a dark movie theatre and coming out changed. In fact, I may never have picked up a camera if it weren’t for the 2006 military coup in Thailand where, despite being Canadian, I grew up. Three years later, “red shirt” protesters built their encampment on one end of my street and the military barricaded the other. A lot of the on-the-ground complexities of the situation I felt weren’t being addressed in international media, and local news was either censored or their towers had been burnt down. This was the time CNN had their iReport initiative and I decided to go interview people on all sides to submit to that. Even though nothing came of my citizen journalism at the time, it sparked a love for using film to both shed light on stories often overlooked in mainstream media and as a way to engage in a world that, growing up as a “global nomad,” I struggled to find a place in.
I took a winding path from there, doing street theatre and thinking I wanted to be a sociologist, then a dancer or maybe an architect, but finally, I was lucky to meet Professor Peter Decherney, who is the head of the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania and a documentary filmmaker/ photographer himself. He partnered with FilmAid International to take some students to Kenya, where we taught workshops on filmmaking and made info-docs that would help new arrivals to the neighboring Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement understand how to get things like food, water and building supplies. I partnered with him on a couple more VR and flat-footage projects throughout my undergrad, doing all the odd jobs one does on small docs but mostly sound and editing. Each experience rekindled in me a desire to become a filmmaker.
My shift to fiction happened over the pandemic. I had always loved writing, from my little poems as a five-year-old to my over-written college essays, but I never thought too much about it until COVID made it the only thing I could do. I came to realize that fiction can speak just as much truth as docs just in a different way. I came to LA to attend the American Film Institute Conservatory, where I am just about to complete my MFA in Screenwriting. While here, I’ve been fortunate to dabble in some directing and I am excited to begin building a career as a fiction and non-fiction, writer and director.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I was born in Canada and raised mostly in Thailand but left home at 15 and have since moved almost every year from France to Wales, around the US, back and forth and so on. For me, settling down to really start building something in one place is a unique challenge – like if you stop running all of a sudden, you might fall over. Sometimes I get paralyzed by climate anxiety and like there’s so much inequality in the world, I don’t even know where to start – I imagine this happens to all of us. The fact that I really love all aspects of filmmaking is also a funny challenge because I want to do it all but really have to focus on just a couple of things at a time if I really want to grow. There’s beauty to this though, because filmmaking is a team sport and it teaches me every day the importance and strength of community. Of course, other challenges exist in film like all fields, from homophobia and sexual harassment to classism, but I am lucky to have found friends and collaborators who are open-minded and kind-hearted. Hopefully, our work will be able to make the world a more empathetic place in general so that the next generation doesn’t have to face these obstacles.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
In all honesty, I am still trying to find my voice and that’s an infinite journey. I am a screenwriter now first and foremost but even in that role, my background in the documentary comes through. I love to tell stories inspired by or based on real life because some things you really can’t make up. I love characters that are nuanced, flawed and, in many ways, uncertain because that feels honest to how we move through the world. I also love stories that are really specific about their time and place both because I get to nerd out in the research and think it is in the specific that we find the universal.
On that note of specificity, an underlying theme to my work is that family can be chosen and codependence is not love. As a bi woman raised by a single mum with three sisters, my stories centre mostly on LGBTQIA+ women and their bonds. Because of my upbringing, themes of migration and environmentalism also permeate both my narrative and documentary my work.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I love that there is always something to do in LA – from hiking in the mountains and watching old movies in theatres to eating food from places you’ve only dreamt of visiting or seeing an underground jazz show. That said, Los Angeles was a very difficult city to move to. Some of this has to do with the reliance on cars. I love public transport because it’s more environmentally friendly and builds a stronger sense of community so I wish that was the default here. It is also really expensive and the wealth divide is unsettlingly stark. I see people trying to do something about it and that’s really inspiring but there’s still so much to be done.
Contact Info:
- Website: melisandefilm.com
- Instagram: @melisande_mclaughlin
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/melisande-mclaughlin
Image Credits
Peter Decherney, Michael Aloyan, Ming Jue Hu, Santiago Serrano, Shi-Hyoung Jeon, Sika Stanton
