Shivali Kansagra
After graduating from New Mexico School for the Arts in 2018, filmmaker Sasha Faust was really more of an acting fan. A subsequent move to Los Angeles quickly taught her that she much preferred working behind the camera. While in California, a serendipitous reconnection with a former Santa Fe pal blossomed into a household full of fellow film aficionados, and Broken Slate Productions was born. Faust has since returned to Santa Fe, and the filmmaking collective’s first short, What We Find in the Sea, is slated to premier at the Center for Contemporay Arts (2:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 12. $10. 1050 Old Pecos Trail, (505) 982-1338) this weekend as part of a Santa Fe Film Festival block featuring seven shorts by women filmmakers—five of which are by locals. The tale of a young woman who finds herself working a fishing boat in Alaska, Faust and company’s film frames the coming-of-age story through commercial fishing—as something surmountable, though no less daunting than growing up itself. We caught up with her to ask a thing or two.
What We Find in the Sea is a subtly intense look at perseverance. What about commercial fishing spoke to that experience?
Coming of age and growing up is an intense period of time, and it takes a lot of perseverance and wading through, figuring things out, understanding cycles of life and figuring out where you fit in in the world. This story came about partially out of a friendship and [one of the creators] and I discussing wanting to make a coming-of-age story with the narrative of going to a new place to find yourself and grappling with things bigger than oneself. One of [their] best friends, who was also a producer on this film, went to Alaska and actually fished on the boat that we shot on when she was just out of high school, and pieces of the film are directly drawn from her experiences.
How deep into that sea-bound life did the crew have to go to best make the film?
We were onboard out at sea very, very far away from land and from other people with the crew during one of their outings. It’s a 58-foot long boat, and we almost doubled the number of people onboard. There were five crew, and they allowed four of us to come shoot. We were sleeping in the wheelhouse because there wasn’t anywhere else to be, and at 4 or 5 am, the captain would come in and say, ‘Alright, turn this back into a boat!’ and we’d roll up our sleeping bags and start filming as soon as the sun rose.
It’s fast-paced, it’s weather, it’s waves and saltwater and protecting equipment. I don’t think you get extra credit for how hard a film is to make, but this was a real exercise in leaping and the net will appear. We were trying to coordinate our schedules with a fishing boat that didn’t know where they were going to be, and 24 hours before we flew to Alaska they wound up in a different place than we thought they would be. We were in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen in my entire life—and it worked. We shot what we were hoping to capture from the script, and it worked.
Did you learn anything of note during this process that you think you’ll carry with you now as a filmmaker?
The big lesson that [we] talked about regularly is the power of asking for help. This project was supported by community every step of the way. We crowdfunded to make our budget, we were put up in the living rooms of places where were were invited in with open arms. Even when we were making our short reel, we didn’t have any footage to show people, so we looked up drone footage and cold called somebody from YouTube who was like, ‘Absolutely you can use my shot!’ It was so powerful witnessing how much people were excited to be a part of it, and how ready and willing people are to help if you ask. I know I’m excited to help people and love helping people, and it’s also powerful to witness that other people are in return.
The other one that sticks out to me is that, if you wait until you’re completely ready to start something, you’ll never start. If you start, then you’ve got one thing, you can build from that. Those things are…they’re powerful. I’m not sure I can give an example, but they live with me from this project. We weren’t cognizant as we were doing it, but we grew up a lot in the process, too. That’s the funny thing about film. We shot this in the summer of 2019 and we were doing post-production during the pandemic. So many creative hearts and minds touch a film before it’s done, now it’s starting to see the light of the world in a different way.
