Filmmaker Tess Harrison: From Inspired Shorts to Her Feature Debut, The Light Upstate
Written by Marisa Bianco
Photo Credit by filmmaker Tess Harrison
“I think I am terrified of losing someone - so finding a way to visualize that space in between life and death is comforting to me,” says Bushwick Film Festival alumna Tess Harrison about her upcoming film, The Light Upstate, which explores grief and its myriad of complexities. Harrison is a filmmaker and actor whose momentum is on the rise. Her work in short narrative film and music videos shows her capacity to tell visually and narratively exciting stories in just a few short minutes. Soon we’ll have the opportunity to see what Harrison can do with the feature-length format in her directorial debut, The Light Upstate, an adaptation of her 2018 short Take Me Out with the Stars, an official selection of the 11th Annual Bushwick Film Festival.
Across Harrison’s directorial work is a talent for capturing setting and character in harmony. The worlds in which her films take place feel real, and the characters feel as if they are in and of those worlds. In her first short, 2015’s DOG, a group of teenagers sit around a bonfire, playing truth or dare. The conversation is silly and innocent enough until one character, Alex, admits a dark secret. It's a startling change in the tone of the conversation, but it works because the film’s visual style remains constant. In the beginning, the smiles and laughter of the bantering teens don’t match the ominous shadows of the flames moving across their faces. It is almost a relief when Alex tells his secret—it diffuses this tension, the mismatch between visuals and dialogue, that Harrison so expertly builds. We’re left with the melancholy of watching these teens’ relationships change before our eyes. The camera lingers on one girl, who is realizing, perhaps for the first time, that we don’t always know people as well as we think we do.
Harrison returns to the bonfire setting from DOG in her 2018 short Take Me Out with the Stars. The short follows two adult siblings as they struggle with the fact that their dying father fled the hospital he was staying in. In the end, the siblings sit at a bonfire, looking up at a stop-motion animated yellow star, representing their father’s spirit, that somehow they can both see. Harrison reveals that she “wanted the star to feel like it was in between the world of the film and the world of the audience.” She says that “the movement of [animator Zuzu Snyder’s] figures really spoke to me,” and “stop motion in particular has such a material presence on screen, especially against a live-action background.” Harrison uses the star to shift focus, which she suggests “allows for the audience to feel that sense of dizziness that you experience in grief - that sense that the world is moving under your feet.”
Take Me Out with the Stars is the type of short that tells a complete narrative, yet draws you into its world so skillfully that I couldn’t help but yearn to know more about the characters and their relationships—with each other and with their father. I want to live in the magical realism a little longer, where we can see the love and the spirits of those we grieve animated across our skies.
Photo Credit by filmmaker Tess Harrison
In The Light Upstate, the siblings are portrayed by Harrison and her real-life brother, Will. Harrison wrote the film for herself and her brother, and “though we are definitely not the characters in the film, we share a shorthand as actors and siblings that created an inimitable tension on screen.” Tess and Will Harrison previously acted together in Tess’s 2015 award-winning short It’s Perfect Here. Describing their experience making the feature, she says, “It was super challenging and rewarding to work on this material together, so hopefully that creates a unique experience for an audience.” In the feature, the missing parent is instead the mother, “a renowned children’s book author and illustrator.” The literal connection to childhood in this character allows the film’s tone to be “steeped in this childlike, magical imagery.” Tess’s character, Eve, “is burying herself in her mother’s art as a way of accessing and staying in the magic of her childhood, while the reality of her mother’s death is pressing on her.” Harrison focuses on the character’s “minute changes,” expressing her hope that “those little shifts in self-awareness are as moving for an audience as they are for me as the writer, director and actress.”
Harrison also has an impeccable sense of how to use music and sound design in visual storytelling. In Take Me Out with the Stars, the titular animated star skips across the screen, seemingly enlivened by the spritely score. The yellow star and its music provide a warm balance to the cool winter tones and the characters’ dark grief. Standout sound design is further apparent in her 2017 short film Things Break In, an official selection of the 10th Annual Bushwick Film Festival. At certain moments we hear the gentle, folksy score, punctuated by short swells of strings and piano, while at other moments we hear the sounds of the farm and nature, whose musical cadence seems like an extension of the score. Then, when a thunderstorm comes, nature and score come together like a serendipitous symphony, just as the two characters come together.
Photo Credit by filmmaker Tess Harrison
In addition to her short film work, Harrison co-directed a narrative podcast series produced by and starring Cole Sprouse called Borrasca in 2020. Written by Rebecca Klingel, whose credits include The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, Borrasca is a horror story and mystery reminiscent of Stephen King’s It and Nic Pizzolattos’ True Detective. The congruity of dialogue, sound effects, and music makes this story an immersive auditory experience. Harrison describes directing a podcast as “like theatre in a lot of ways. Moves fast, you can play around with the performances and clock the tiniest changes in delivery when you are only working with the voice.”
What’s next for this emerging writer, director, and actor? This fall, Harrison will participate in the Nostos Screenwriting Retreat in Italy, where she’ll work on the film The French Movie, “about an American teenager studying abroad in the south of France in 2005,” which explores “themes of sexuality, coming of age and national identity.” She is also working on an adaptation of her short film, Things Break In. You can see all of Tess Harrison’s work on her website.
