Alexandra Simpson makes her directorial and screenwriting debut, No Sleep Till , at Venice Critics’ Week, a dreamy, visually stunning film about the locals of a small Florida beach town under threat from a hurricane. The film stars Sylvain Froidevaux, as moisture drips from the screen as teens party and skateboard, and a girl stands at the register in a souvenir shop that attracts almost no customers. There’s an aspiring comedian and his friend, who can’t make the jump to the bigger clubs up north, a Zen-like storm catcher, and the lifeguards of public pools. All the characters also live under the threat of urban renewal, which could cost them their town.
Simpson herself was born and raised in Paris but spent her summers in the Atlantic coastal town of Neptune Beach, Florida, where much of the film was shot, successfully capturing a slowly disappearing life in the state.
“When it came to showing these places specifically, I was very observant in the sense that they were chosen because they are kind of the last vestiges of old Florida… Every time I go back, everything is more and more different. It’s bigger; it’s more polished,” she says. “And the goal, also of putting this during an impending hurricane, was to show the fragility of the old wooden houses that are left. So, there was this tension.”
But its specificity leads to a universal feeling.
“I would say that I approached this project with an outsider's eye, European, even though I know this city like the back of my hand, but it was from an outsider's point of view as well,” she says.
Simpson says that when she started writing the script, she wasn't looking to tell a linear story. “It was never about telling a story that was going to evolve, it was more about observing a certain behavior and a certain sense of vulnerability. And having a whole cast allowed me to really delve into that, while allowing myself to really work on tone and atmosphere and place, and not focus on some kind of dramatic plot,” she says, adding that she felt a lot of empathy and compassion for her characters.
“But there is a great power in their own isolation, in the sense that they somehow have a sense of belonging to this city that is very specific and which therefore gives them, I don't know, a certain grace,” she says.
The film is produced by Omnes Film Group, which has had two of its films, Tyler Taormina's “Christmas Eve in Miller's Point” and Carson Lund's “Eephus,” screened at Cannes Directors' Fortnight. Taormina is a producer of “No Sleep Till.”
Simpson happened to see a poster for Taormina's Ham on Rye and was blown away by it. She loved the film and “the freedom he had in making his film, it's just an amazing film. That really touched me. I reached out to him, and we eventually met, and he was a producer on the film, and it was an amazing collaboration.”
The crew for No Sleep was made up of her friends from Geneva film school. The teaching was hands-on but “it was very experimental because it was about hosting different filmmakers and doing workshops with them and exploring different ways of getting a vision.”
For her next film, she envisions a more traditional story set in a small town in rural America. “I want to show the relationship between two young sisters and their ailing father,” she says, who live near a fairground, which adds a certain semblance to the proceedings. “There will be different layers, but definitely a more linear narrative style, because I want to challenge myself in that kind of writing as well.”
