Director finds fertile ground in own life
S.F. filmmaker’s first feature made with a crew of mostly students
Like so many entities in San Francisco’s Mission District, the Women’s Building on 18th Street is swathed in a colorful mural. Called “MaestraPeace” and painted by a group of notable female artists in 1994, it is a stunning series of images, including the depiction of a nude woman with a baby visible in her uterus. It sits at the very top of the building.
The mural makes an unforgettable appearance in Kara Herold’s debut feature, “39½,” which had its world premiere Saturday, Oct. 5, at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and will screen again at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13, in the Century Larkspur 3 theater. Herold laughs when someone jokes that the mural’s panel seemed to just be waiting for her and this film, in which fertility is very much part of the story.
“Yeah, I know,” the filmmaker says. “It’s true.”
Semiautobiographical in nature, “39½” is a comedy about a Mission District experimental filmmaker named Kara, played by actor and writer Beth Lisick. As she begins work on her next film, Kara is nearing 40 and unmarried, her biological clock sounding an alarm she cannot shut off. Blending live action and animation, Herold pulls the audience on a journey with Kara through relationships, doctors’ appointments and lots of conversations with her mother, sister and work partners and friends as she considers parenthood in a city famous for a dearth of kids.
While some of the story is inspired by Herold’s own life, that was not her only source.
“In San Francisco, I knew a lot of people who were contemplating parenthood in their late 30s, who were all artists who weren’t married, contemplating whether or not they were going to have kids,” Herold says. “Some did by themselves. Some decided that they wanted to be in a partnership to have a kid and just decided not to have kids.”
“39½” did not begin life as a narrative feature. Herold, who moved to the Mission District in 1992 to attend the graduate film program at San Francisco State University and now splits her time between San Francisco and Syracuse, N.Y., where she teaches at Syracuse University, previously made short animations and short documentaries. Among her works are “Grrlyshow” (2001), about girlzines, and the autobiographical “Bachelorette, 34,” about her life as a mid30s single woman in San Francisco.
Herold originally envisioned her new film as a documentary — she has five years of footage that may yet become a film to sit beside “39½.” The turn to fiction happened when she created a new class at Syracuse, “OnSet Production.” With the exception of her cinematographer and sound recorder, her entire
Kara Herold, top, directs a scene in “39½,” which stars Beth Lisick, above, as a woman who is considering motherhood as she approaches 40.
crew would be made up of students. The majority of interiors would shoot in Syracuse with exteriors to be shot on her home base, primarily in her own neighborhood.
“We tried to stay away from some of the more iconic settings, like there’s no shot of the Golden Gate Bridge,” Herold says. “We tried to keep it sort of in the Mission, you know, where a lot of independent filmmakers lived at one time. A few still do.
“This is a kind of a memoir, so I was trying to capture San Francisco as it was, you know, maybe 10 years ago,” she says of a film in which Artists Television Access stands in for the feminist filmmaker coop the fictional Kara belongs to, where Kara and her friends chat in the openair seats at Coffee Mission on 24th Street (actually a business that is a relative newcomer to the neighborhood) and where Valencia Street in general — reflecting none of its current gentrification — represents an artist’s natural habitat.
Initially, Herold considered playing Kara herself, but she laughingly says that she flunked her own audition. Even if she had felt more confident in her acting ability, she admits she was concerned about performing and having to direct not just her cast but herself as well. A longtime fan of Lisick’s, Herold knew immediately she wanted to cast her in the role.
“I’ve known Beth for a long time and seen her in all sorts of different circumstances, whether it was in her band or seeing her perform at Yerba Buena or reading her books,” Herold says. “Beth actually plays me better than I would’ve played myself because she does physical comedy very well and she’s funny, she’s got funny facial expressions. I never actually had auditions. I just asked Beth if she could do it.” Herold laughs. “She agreed, but she agreed to a threeday process, which then exploded to a feature film.”
Originally envisioned as another short on Herold’s resume, the story expanded as she brought in not just the Greek chorus of her family and friends, but also boyfriends, excursions away from San Francisco to the Midwest and myriad other branches a story can sprout when a middleaged single woman weighs whether to become a mother.
Inspired by Herold’s own specific situation, “39½” resonates beyond the individual.
“More people are staying single or else not getting married. Even if they’re in couples, they are not getting married. The whole pressure of getting married and having kids is no longer necessarily what it was once was,” Herold says. “I think there’s a cultural change for sure going on, but that doesn’t eliminate the desire to want to have a family, you know? And, so, it’s just trying to figure out sort of alternative ways of doing that if you haven’t met a person that you want to have a family with.
“Basically, I was in my late 30s and I just thought you see a lot of publicity around people in their 40s having kids,” Herold says of the seed of “39½.” “I just kept putting it off, hoping that, at some point, I would be able to afford it or meet somebody or find the right situation. And then when I hit 39, I was like, OK, well, it’s now or never and decided to try to do it on my own. That didn’t eliminate any of the anxieties of, well, if this actually works out, what am I going to do? You know, something’s going to have to go, which is true for anybody that has kids, whether with a partner or not.”