Kit Zauhar's Actual People is now showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting January 18, 2023, in the series Debuts.
Hello,
Thank you for watching, considering watching, or having watched my first feature, Actual People.
I shot this over the course of 10 days for 10K around New York and Philly. I was 24, surrounded by the best friends and collaborators imaginable, incredibly broke, even more exhilarated.
Since then, I’ve gotten to travel to many beautiful places with the film, have written some horrible poems (maybe one good one), fallen in love a couple times, have sprouted gray hairs that remind me of tinsel stuck in my curls, made another film; and there’s so many other changes that I know you don’t care about because you don’t know me.
But that’s the thing. I’ve changed. And inevitably, the film has too.
When you make a film with yourself that is, in many ways, about yourself, it becomes both an artifact and a continuation. I like to think of the film as a metamorphic rock, formed by pressure and heat, shifting and conforming and adapting to a new time. Even as I hold and consider it now, it feels slightly different than the last time I picked it up.
People of various ages, demographics, mindsets, will all pick up a different stone. I made this as a young woman for young women, but it’s been a very pleasant surprise to see how universal the little experience of my character’s growing up and fucking up can be.
Actual People is an homage to the low-budget indies that made me see that filmmaking is always possible if you fight for it. What we made is by no means polished or precise, but it is, I believe, a truthful portrait of the strange, brutal, and ecstatic process of growing up.