The first movie that made Bill Chen aware of what a filmmaker could achieve was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”
The South African-Chinese filmmaker didn’t grow up watching a lot of movies or television, he said – his parents had very strict rules about screentime. He was so shielded from that world that for a long time, he thought that the actors in movies were the people that made them, because they were people that he could see and visually associate with the film.
That all changed when he was a teenager and became deeply interested in filmmaking. Then, during his first year at New York University, he saw “There Will Be Blood.”
“I was blown away that movies could be like that,” Chen said. “I think that probably had the most distinct impact on me of – someone created this, and they had a specific artistic sensibility that was unique to them.”
Chen spent the next few years trying to find his own artistic voice, and has found it with “Chicken.” The filmmaker’s new semi-autobiographical short film is nominated for Best International Film at this year’s BronzeLens Film Festival, and screens on Aug. 29 at the Tara Theatre.
The film follows Peter and Paul (played by twins Peter and Paul Mapfumo), two young brothers growing up in a rigid South African community. “Chicken” explores what happens to the brothers’ relationship when one of them is sexually assaulted by another child.
Child-on-child sexual abuse is a difficult topic to talk about, and “Chicken” handles it with care (nothing is ever explicitly shown). The movie is based on Chen’s own experience, but he said that he didn’t consciously start writing the film as a way to deal with his trauma. After moving back to South Africa in 2019, he stayed longer than he originally meant to once the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Stuck inside, he was forced to reckon with a lot of things he’d been running away from – not just what had happened in his past, but his struggle finding his own artistic voice.
“I was rejecting the person that I was as an artist in terms of what perspective I had,” Chen said.
He began thinking about what happened to him as a child and started to realize that it might work as a short film – a medium that historically, he’d had trouble with.
“Objectively, outside of my experience with it, I think it makes a very strong film narratively and structurally,” he said. “And that’s what convinced me to make it.”
Chen also thought that the film could have real impact as far as making the subject of child-on-child sexual abuse easier for people to talk about.
“I even struggled to talk about it until I made the film,” he said. “Making the film makes it much easier to talk about because it’s there. It’s kind of inescapable now, because it exists.”
One of the clearest strengths of “Chicken” is its sound design. The film is mostly set at an all-boys school, and there’s a militaristic sensibility throughout its runtime. There’s a droning, rhythmic sound running under the film’s early scenes – almost like the sound of boots marching.
“We were thinking of this idea of machinery – this sort of machine, this factory of men,” Chen said. “That these institutions and the systems around us are ultimately very mechanical in terms of how we produce the men in our society. That it starts from very young.”
Many of the filmmaking decisions in “Chicken” came down to the question of perspective. In one scene, Peter and Paul’s parents and the parents of two other children have a dinner party and talk about their kids’ schooling, the conversation dripping with gender stereotypes and homophobia. Chen said he grew up in a very homophobic environment – an influence he had to work to unlearn later in life.
“These kinds of conversations happen so casually that we just think that they get blown over children’s minds,” Chen said. “Ultimately, the perspective is guided by the idea that I think children pick up on a lot more than we give them credit for. Even if they’re not super aware of it, I think it does enter their subconscious.”
Finding the right young actors to play Peter and Paul was one of the most important decisions Chen and the rest of the team made. Chen said they weren’t looking for “actor” kids, wanting a performance style that felt a bit more natural. The Mapfumo twins fit the bill. While filming, the crew worked to preserve that realistic style. The crew went in with a plan for what they wanted, but didn’t give the kids the script, opting to instead tell them what the scene was about and go from there.
Chen worked with a child psychologist and an intimacy coordinator to figure out how best to approach taking on such serious subject matter while keeping the environment safe for the young actors. While there are no graphic scenes in the film, they ultimately decided to shield the young actors from the topic altogether.
Chen said he couldn’t have done that without the psychologist and intimacy coordinator.
“Without them, I just don’t know how I would have been able to navigate it,” he said. “They were completely invaluable to the process of being able to shoot the film and find workarounds to shooting the scenes in the way we wanted to shoot them without sacrificing the detail required.”
Making “Chicken” also helped bring Chen closer to his twin brother, Allan Chen, who composed the score for the film. They’d worked on projects together before, but this time the process was obviously more personal.
“It’s not something we ever really talked about in terms of our experience growing up, specifically with this incident,” Chen said. “Over the years, we’ve both gone to therapy and dealt with our sh*t much more. So this was definitely the easiest time we’ve collaborated.”
The full schedule and ticket information for the BronzeLens Film Festival can be found online.
