First-Time Filmmakers Share a Secret Weapon: The Library

Annapurna Sriram might not have made her debut feature Fucktoys — about a young woman's psychic-guided journey through a colorful land called Trashtown — if not for her childhood library.

"We would rent movies all the time, and my mom really preferred that we rented them from the Nashville Public Library because it was free, and weirdly there was a very strange collection of art house movies," she said Friday at a Provincetown International Film Festival panel about first-time filmmaking.

"So I saw Polyester and Pecker and Cemetery Man and But I'm a Cheerleader at a really young age, just based off the VHS boxes. And my parents kind of let us watch whatever we wanted from the library without worrying it, because they thought it was like educational."

The public library was educational not just for Sriram, but also for her fellow panelists, Jimmy director Yashaddai Owens and Plainclothes director Carmen Emmi. All three writer-directors talked about sharing an appreciation for public libraries that helped them become filmmakers.

"Let's take a moment and hear it for libraries," noted panel moderator Eugene Hernandez, director of the Sundance Film Festival.

For Sriram to reference John Waters' 1991 Polyester and 1998 Pecker at PIFF was something of a full circle moment: Waters is a patron saint of the festival, who turns up for screenings, hosts wild fundraisers, and, on Saturday, will interview Ari Aster.

Sriram, Owens and Emmi noted that in addition to resources like the library-connected Kanopy app, which lets viewers stream films for free, libraries offer a litany of opportunities for filmmakers, both in terms of resources and inspiration.

Owens said he outlined Jimmy, a narrative that imagines the life of young James Baldwin in Paris, at the New York Public Library's flagship location, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building near Bryant Park.

"You go to a library, see everyone with their phones off and kind of studious, in tandem, and it's like a force, and it's a spirit that we all pick up on. And it was really helpful for me just to go and mean business about what I wanted to do," he told MovieMaker after the panel.

Also Read: Say Yes to the Provincetown International Film Festival

Emmi, meanwhile, recalled that he spent his early years as a filmmaker at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, located at Lincoln Center. The director, whose film is about an undercover cop ordered to bust men having sex in public places, would both read plays and watch recorded productions.

"They have plays that are archived, and that's how I learned how to write. Because a lot of the Broadway shows are so expensive now, when I moved to New York in 2018 I couldn't really afford to go to the theater as much as I wanted to. But I would go to Lincoln Center and I would just watch plays," he explained.

The event was held at the beloved Provincetown entertainment and hospitality complex The Crown and Anchor, and if you needed a reminder that libraries are all about public service, you could walk a few blocks to the lovely and historic Provincetown Public Library, one of the few buildings in the world that advertises, prominently on its sign, that it offers public restrooms. Few things will garner so much goodwill in a beach town crowded with tourists.

Given that it's a library, that's only the beginning of its services: It also offers a fantastic selection of books, including about Provincetown itself, a landing site for the Pilgrims that has since become an arts and LGBTQ+ mecca. And its "library of things" invites patrons to check out a wide array of usual gadgets, tools and sources of entertainment and education.

But times being as the are, libraries are under attack — as one of the film's playing at PIFF, The Librarians, reminds us. The award-winning documentary, from director Kim A. Snyder, profiles brave librarians standing up against book bans and other forms of censorship.

"In other countries, this would never happen," said Owens. "People don't settle at all. We have to stop settling and see the collective force that we have."

Main image: The Provincetown Public Library. MovieMaker.