“Monica is an intimate portrait of a transgender woman living in Los Angeles who returns home to the Midwest after 20 years when she learns her mother is dying. Through this painful time, the film explores themes of abandonment, aging, acceptance, and redemption. Director Andrea Pallaoro has only worked with 35mm in his previous films so his first instinct was to shoot on film. I've been a film lover since I first picked up a motion picture camera 14 years ago. Knowing our approach to shoot Monica extremely first person, with restrained camera movement, and with the camera very close in on Trace, film was the obvious choice. I also wanted to be able to control what fell off into the shadows, where often digital has too much information in the shadows and it's hard to create a strong contrast ratio with intention. Andrea referenced medium format portraiture and decided that the aspect ratio 1.2:1 (the same as a Pentax 6x7) would be both challenging and intentionally create blocking where the actors had to stack amongst each other. We wanted shallow depth of field to keep the focus subjective, through the eyes and experience of Monica, therefore we shot 4-perf 35mm and stuck to Kodak 500. This allowed us to be flexible between daylight and lowlight scenes, wasting as little film as possible.” DP @katearizmendi on MONICA which was shot on 500T 4-Perf 35mm with director Andrea Pallaoro. The film had its premiere in Sept at the Venice Film Festival. Watch the trailer in our On Film: Trailers playlist on youtube.com/kodak. Directed by Andrea Pallaoro DP @katearizmendi Produced by @ginaresnick @eric.b.cook @chrismdow Eleanora Granata, Orlando Tirado Line Producer @chenney.chen 1st AD @lxklein 1st AC @j.ytc 2nd AC @sam1am_ Loaders @emmapenrose @trinamulligan, Michael Woo Still Photographer @justjac Camera PA @luke.m.holliday Viktor - Viktor Weiszhaupt Gaffer @jakelyon513 Key Grip @yeaforbes Costume Designer @patrikmilani Asst Costume Margaux Solano Prod Designer Andrew Clark Set Decorator Daniel Baker Lead Person Raya Schweitzer Dir's Asst @draw_gregory Colorist @christian.gazzi Process/Scan: @kodakfilmlabatl #ShotOnFilm #35mm #kodakfilmlabatl