While watching Tori Lancaster’s debut, Mother Future Self, I thought of another film I saw earlier this year, Extra Geography. Both focus on fracturing or fractured friendships between two girls in isolated locations and how their evolving understandings of themselves, their goals and desires shape their diverging futures. However, writer-director Lancaster found her inspiration in another boarding school story: the 1959 John Knowles novel A Separate Peace. Another story about a friendship straining under the weight of internal differences, but while a war rages in the outside world.
In Mother Future Self, a pair of former friends, Sofi (Imani Jade Powers) and Jordan (Betsey Brown), accidentally reunite at an experimental dance retreat. Old tensions reintroduce themselves when Sofi and Jordan are paired up by Colleen (real-life dance instructor K.J. Holmes). Although we’re never sure what went wrong between them, Jordan is an abrasive figure, sniping at the other participants through derision and aggression, eventually becoming the sandpaper that helps to polish Sofi’s compassion.
It is also a film that digs its hands into the muddier places where creative work and labor conflict. Compensation for art often comes from perceived value, and those industries are frequently seen as leeches that drain the life out of creatives and give very little back. Mother Future Self simmers at the culmination of its themes, whispering its story as the dance retreat days roll by, punctuating them with moments of menace, contrasting humor, and dawning revelation.
It’s not a film that I’ll come back to, but it is one that compellingly asks us to reach for its meaning. After the final scene, I began to see the retreat as a metaphor for Sofi’s exploration of self, the other participants as parts of her psyche, and Jordan as the shortcomings of a past self she can’t seem to shake. If that read holds up, Colleen might be the midwife who allows Sofi to become the mother of her future self. Either that’s Lancaster’s poetic heart or mine (maybe both).
