Signature Move is a hybrid indie romantic comedy and coming-of-age story about a Pakistani-Muslim lesbian who falls in love with a Mexican woman (and competitive wrestling) during the course of a Chicago summer. The film is directed by a woman, Jennifer Reeder; written by women, Lisa Donato and lead actor Fawzia Mirza; and focuses on women of color—a relative anomaly in a domestic cinematic landscape largely filtered through the lenses of straight white men.
Leah Pickett: Why is the mission of Full Spectrum Features (“to increase diversity in the media arts by producing, exhibiting, and supporting the work of women, LGBTQ, and minority filmmakers”) important to you?
Park: I started as a filmmaker, as most filmmakers do, primarily focused on making my own work—stuff that I wrote and directed. I got drawn into producing because it was a way to keep working on my own projects and also help someone else realize their vision. And the more I did that, the more I found that enjoyable. It’s more limiting in some ways to just work on your own material—there’s only so many stories that you have inside of you to tell. I’m not one of these storytellers who can tell an infinite amount of stories. And it just got to a point where I felt like, “This has got to be much more practical, given the diversity and social issue aims of the projects that I’m drawn to,” and I realized I could bring all of this activity together under the umbrella of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit instead of going in a piecemeal, less organized way.
What’s your impression of the queer cinema scene in Chicago?
How do Full Spectrum Features’ programs, like the Summer Youth Program and Expanded Cinema, factor in to the organization’s overall mission of supporting underrepresented filmmakers?
Expanded Cinema is one of my pet projects. Basically, it’s challenging filmmakers to create more of a live experience around their films, asking them to try to take their films off of the two-dimensional screen and traditional setup where you have the audience sitting there and watching the film [in] static engagement. For example, a lot of the filmmakers brought in a live musical element, a musician playing a live score to their film. We set up multiple screens so filmmakers could do two or three screen projections.
